Bookworm on lying with statistics

Bookworm looks at how statistics have been used to obscure differences between health care in the US and in other countries.

What I had to explain to my friends is that comparing infant morality rates from one country to another is meaningful only if the countries being compared use the same methods to tally those statistics.  It turns out, though, that America is an information honest broker, while other countries, especially socialized medicine countries, are not

 

And...

 

Or to put it more simply, socialized medicine countries refuse to include in their infant mortality rates fragile newborns.  America, however, counts all live births as, well, live births, so, unsurprisingly, America, reporting honestly, has more deaths to tally when these same fragile infants die.  This means that, when news stories blithely compare infant mortality under the private American system to any other country's socialized system, American readers are totally unaware that they're seeing apples compared to oranges.  The news stories are meaningless and misleading, but nobody knows that.  Readers think they're well informed, when they're actually misinformed.

Interestingly, both of my friends, when I explained this to them, instantly switched over to maternal mortality rates, which they claim are lower in all sorts of other countries too.  It didn't seem to occur to them that, if the infant mortality rates are subject to statistical jiggery-pokery, there's a substantial likelihood that the maternal mortality rates are too.  They were both shocked when I suggested the possibility that a socialized medicine country might report a mother's death simply as a "stroke," rather than a "stroke incurred during labor."  If this is the case, comparing maternal morality rates across borders would again be a futile exercise in apples and oranges comparisons.

My friends were also taken aback when I suggested that America's statistics might be affected by the fact that, unlike any other country in the world, America is truly a cultural and genetic melting pot.  That is, unlike countries that have fairly homogeneous populations, America has pockets-of-this and blends-of-that, all bringing to the table different diseases, different diets, different culture practices, and different histories of longevity:

Roughly a century ago, many Swedes immigrated to America. They've done very well here. Only about 6.7 percent of Swedish-Americans live in poverty. Also a century ago, many Swedes decided to remain in Sweden. They've done well there, too. When two economists calculated Swedish poverty rates according to the American standard, they found that 6.7 percent of the Swedes in Sweden were living in poverty.
In other words, you had two groups with similar historical backgrounds living in entirely different political systems, and the poverty outcomes were the same.
A similar pattern applies to health care. In 1950, Swedes lived an average of 2.6 years longer than Americans. Over the next half-century, Sweden and the U.S. diverged politically. Sweden built a large welfare state with a national health service, while the U.S. did not. The result? There was basically no change in the life expectancy gap. Swedes now live 2.7 years longer.
....

 

David Brooks uses these facts to do his typical fence straddle ("Trust me, I'm a conservative, even though I espouse almost exclusively Progressive policies"), but he still manages to make a good point about America — we aren't like other countries.  Trying to compare our vast, sprawling, diverse, lively country to a culturally static country such as Japan (where they all eat fish), is illogical.  But the news outlets do it all the time, and credulous readers lap it up, assuming they they are knowledgeable, when they are merely increasingly confused.

 

And there are comments on voting patterns and the Times Square (attempted) bomber.