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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello,

Politicians of yore used to give eloquent speeches on high ideals and create memorable pieces of prose that survived decades or centuries. They still played politics, but they did it with a slice more brains.

Yes, let's friggin regress, please.

--Anthony

"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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Business is about delivering what the people want.

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Yes, I can set up an auto factory right here in my mom's attic. All that is required is a few engineers, I can probably find them in Iran, India or Belarus, so cost would be low. The main obstacle is actually the US govt.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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Business is about delivering what the people want.

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Uh... business under capitalism IS about making money. For such a bright guy you have a big blind spot.

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All it takes is Dems calling it like it REALLY IS (calling someone the mental equivalent of a dingin room table, for example) to push back successfully. YES you have to do it over and over again in concert to get traction, but really... if someone is lying they should damn well be called on it! Eventually it becomes known that information from the right is untrustworthy at best.

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Congressman Roy Blunt (R- MO) said:
I’m 59. In either Canada or Great Britain, if I broke my hip, I couldn’t get it replaced.

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Our friends at the Post-Dispatch checked the assertion and found it to be false. We did our own fact-checking and verified their work.

In an Aug. 16 editorial challenging Blunt's assertion, the newspaper wrote that "at least 63 percent of hip replacements performed in Canada last year and two-thirds of those done in England were on patients age 65 or older. More than 1,200 in Canada were done on people older than 85."

Let's take those numbers individually.

On the question of Canadian hip replacements, the Post-Dispatch cited a report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), which describes itself as "an independent, not-for-profit organization that provides essential data and analysis on Canada’s health system and the health of Canadians." The report draws on information from several databases, including nationwide figures on medical procedures undertaken in hospitals. Using those statistics, it found that in all of Canada (except for the province of Quebec, for which information was unavailable), 63 percent of all hip replacements in 2006-2007 were performed on patients 65 and older. So Blunt was wrong, and the newspaper was right.

As for the the number of Canadian hip replacements for the 85-and-older demographic, the newspaper actually underestimated how many there were. The number for 2006-2007, according to the same report, was 1,577.

Just to make sure these numbers were valid, we checked with Shirley Chen, a senior analyst at the Canadian Joint Replacement Registry, a project of CIHI and orthopedic surgeons in Canada that collects statistics on hip and knee joint replacements. She confirmed the numbers reported here.

For Britain, the Post-Dispatch got its figures from a 2000 report by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, a group that determines whether particular treatments are covered by the British National Health Service. The report said that "the over 65-year age group accounts for two in every three" hip replacements.

When we called Britain's National Health Service's Information Centre for Health and Social Care -- the NHS' hub for medical statistics -- they provided new numbers showing that 87 percent of hip replacements were performed on people age 60 or over. That's a different age bracket than what the newspaper used, but it still means Blunt was wrong.

Blunt acknowledged his mistake to the Post-Dispatch and promised to do better. "I'm glad you pointed that out to me," he told the newspaper. "I won’t use that example any more." He blamed the bad information on testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, given by "some people who are supposed to be experts on Canadian health care." We looked through past Congressional testimony using both Congressional Quarterly and Google but we couldn't find a reference that fit the description. Blunt's office did not respond to our request for an explanation.

Unlike others who have been caught in falsehoods in the health care debate, it's notable that Blunt has acknowledged his mistake and said he was sorry. But still, he was wrong about both countries and would be eligible for hip replacements for many years to come.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Ah the audacity of hope. I fear progress. I like things the way they are. Science can progress, but politics should regress back into the stone age.

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Nah, just the 50's.Everything was peachy then. ;)

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Originally posted by Bytemite:

Although I did need to apologize, because I did kind of blow up out of frustration there. No one here deserved for me to yell at them. Pizmobeach was just trying to be informative about why death panels are a fabrication. I agree with that, so my outburst was needless.

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