More problems with the WHO rankings

Do they reflect what matters to most Americans?

The WHO rankings have more to do with what liberals value in a health care system (fairness, equality, etc.) than what most Americans value in a health care system (quality, access, efficiency, innovation, convenience). Though this doesn’t stop people like Mr. Moore from trying to convince everyone that these apples are really oranges.

Comments

Anonymous
“Though this doesn’t stop people like Mr. Moore from trying to convince everyone that these apples are really oranges.”
I see, this is more of Kevin’s Obsessive Dislike of Michael More.
Say, you know what the article at RangelMD doesn’t have? Any methodology for ranking the US with other countries. Oh, sure Rangel cherry picks one stat to try and make its case, but the article is really about hating liberals–something RangelMD seems to have in common with KevinMD. God forbid that everyone should have access to healthcare, because that would be “liberal”!
Payne Hertz
Okay, so liberals just want to make sure fat people have the same health care as thin people, and don’t mind if that health care is poor quality, inefficient or inconvenient…or something.What a joke.
One of the things that never gets mentioned by either side in this debate is that in a for-profit healthcare system, a patient can never really trust anyone. When so many doctors and hospitals have become profit-seekers, addicted to money, and ready to lie, steal or cheat to get it, you have to second-guess everything that is recommended to you. Do you really need that MRI, or is the doctor getting a kickback from the imaging lab? Is that back surgery really necessary, or is the surgeon just recommending it so he can make some $$$? Is that prescription really the best choice for you, or does the doctor have a cozy relationship with a drug rep?
You can never really be sure about these questions so long as there is a profit motive for doctors to lie.
Anonymous
Quality?
Like the hack neurosurgeon in Rhode Island that for the second time operated on the wrong side of a patient? All of that “best and brightest” and X years of training as purported justification for his exorbitant income and the moron can’t tell one side from the other? We won’t even mention the “quality” engendered by the corrupt crony packed medical board in that state that did not permanently strip him of his license the first time he made a mortal mistake. Quality indeed…
Anonymous
Payne Hertz:
Join an HMO which salaries it’s docs. They have no profit motive to provide unneeded care.
Then of course they have a profit motive to avoid providing care, but you have to decide what you want.
You could go to public clinics. In my state there is a network of state hospitals with attatched clinics open to all–with all the employess salaried. Of course then the motive is to provide whatever care will get them out the door on time and chalk up another day to the old pension with as little effort as possible.
Bottom line, there is no “system” that will eliminate a certain conflict of interest. The beautiful thing about our jumbled up collection of systems, is that you have some choice about which set of flaws you get to live with.
It is not up to the WHO or anyone else to dictate to you or me the set of values you want to organize your life around.
Freedom is a wonderful thing.
Fan of RangelMD.com
Comment #1, “I see, this is more of Kevin’s Obsessive Dislike of Michael More(sic).”
Ad hominem attack.
Comment #2, “You can never really be sure about these questions so long as there is a profit motive for doctors to lie.”
Circumstantial ad hominem attack.
Comment #3, “Quality? Like the hack neurosurgeon in Rhode Island that for the second time operated on the wrong side of a patient?
A good example of the fallacy of misleading vividness.
I don’t mean to be rude but if the person(s) who made these comments actually graduated from college then they really should consider suing that college for utterly failing to teach them, any critical thinking skills what-so-ever.
That is all.
Anonymous
No fallacy at all worshiper at the medical idol. There is nothing vivid about the example. Unfortunately, it is all to mundane given the crony packed medical licensing boards that do everything in their power to keep their fellow deities in practice. If quality were really what the American allopathic medical system were about then one would see a plethora of incompetents loosing their licenses.
Mike
There are few doctors who wouldn’t like to see everyone get some health care. No doctor wants to turn away a person who needs medical assistance.
But doctors ALSO don’t want said patient to have coverage, only to find they can’t get the treatment/test they need because there’s limited supply/waiting times. In England, I’ve read you sometiems can’t get dialysis in a timely manner,m so some of the renal failure patients just get by on pills… that is until they pass away.
Could the morons who insist on blabbing about “deities” and “best and brightest” nonsense please address THOSE issues which are actually mentioned in the post?
Anonymous
The WHO rankings are probably more reflective of liberal values since just about the entire world is to the left of the USA. That said, American health care should reflect American values. This isn’t an entirely good thing however, as the most cherished American health care value is retaining the right to sue their doc. This drives a substantial share of the increased costs as well as all the unforeseen consequences of practicing defensive medicine. Anyway, I think Michael Moore made some good points and presented them in a relatively fair fashion. It’s time that we in the medical profession really start to realize that our jobs are a true privelege and that we must as a duty advocate for our patients, which includes advocating for some form of universal health coverage. In short, if we don’t want socialized medicine, we’d better come up with a decent alterative and quickly.
Anonymous
All you critics of the WHO rankings – how would you measure healthcare systems and what would the rankings be under your system?
Anonymous
A value stronger in the US than in Europe is individual responsibility–that means individual repsonsibility for meeting ones own material needs–including healthcare, making ones own decisions about what sort of social arrangements one wants to seek care in (and funding it), and even individual responsibility by the doctors for their own performance.
In ’93 Hilary Clinton offered docs relief from malpractice fears but they refected that seeing it for what it is–surrendering that accountability can only come at the price of surrendering professional autonomy and responsibility and ultimately 2500 years of professionalism. That would result in losing their capacity to advocate for and serve their patients as individuals, making them the servants of “society” instead.
The WHO is a vast bureaucracy with an interenal culture of socialist collectivism and naturally choses metrics that follow from that mindset. It assumes that there is a national system and measures it’s performace in serving society.
The US does not have a healthcare system and so any ranking comparing it to nations that do is making false comparisons–apples and oranges. We instead have many systems, some focused on improving the health of populations, others on providing specific services to individuals who themselves move in and out of various sytems over time–or choose to remain out of allopathic medicine altogether.
Seeking to rank the US that context is like using baseball stats in ranking cricket players.
Anonymous
“Comment #1, “I see, this is more of Kevin’s Obsessive Dislike of Michael More(sic)[sic].”
Ad hominem attack.”
No, an ad hominen would be calling Kevin a fat idiot. To my knowledge Kevin is neither fat nor an idiot. (By the way, the proper way to use “sic” is in [brackets].)”
On the other hand, Kevin does have a proven history of dislike for Michael Moore. The sheer number which certainly seems to seem obsessive to me. Pointing out that this post is just one more in a series of such posts is merely factual.
Anonymous
“Comment #3, “Quality? Like the hack neurosurgeon in Rhode Island that for the second time operated on the wrong side of a patient?
A good example of the fallacy of misleading vividness.”
Really? I was unaware that you proved that this example was unjustified.
While the aforementioned could be an example of that matches your contention you, oh so logical one, didn’t see fit to prove your case. You merely trotted out the name of a logical fallacy, declare QED and take a bow. You should ask for a refund your self, for you should full well know that the example isn’t in and of itself a fallacy unless you prove it is not representative example. You are the very thing you claim to abhor, someone playing loose with logical argumentation. However, unlike the poster you were trying to defeat, you are also a hypocrite for claiming the logical high ground while, in fact, cutting corners in your logic. They made no such pretenses.
Payne Hertz
Anonymous 4:57:
Are you saying there is no possible system under which doctors can be trusted? Then perhaps we need a system with real “freedom” where we don’t have to deal with doctors at all unless absolutely necessary. Since 90 percent of what doctors do is throw a script at you to shuffle you out of the office as fast as possible so they can squeeze in more patients and make more $$$, once we know what we need we should not longer need a script.
In a system where doctors are salaried, and accountable to the people through their representatives in a democratic government, there is no profit motive to give unnecessary care, and while there may be pressure to deny care to cut costs, that can be rectified by the people at the voting booth. At least with socialized medicine, you get what you pay for and you are not paying out half of every dollar spent on profit and bureaucratic overhead. As it stands, costs are running out of control in the medical system and it will soon collapse of its own weight, so you better start figuring out which system you want.
Payne Hertz
“Comment #1, “I see, this is more of Kevin’s Obsessive Dislike of Michael More(sic).”
Ad hominem attack.”
Spelling flames are the lowest form of ad hominem attack.
“Comment #2, “You can never really be sure about these questions so long as there is a profit motive for doctors to lie.”
Circumstantial ad hominem attack.”
No, common sense. Do you trust used car salesmen, or just dismmiss everything that is said about them as “ad hominem?”
Do a search on Google for “MRI, kickback, doctor,” and “unnecessary surgery” and tell us what you find.
1—Medicare fraud estimated at $33 billion a year:
http://www.ncpa.org/~ncpa/health/pdh5.html
2—Example of one of hundreds of MRI kickback schemes:
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/00990/mri-black-box.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/26dl39
3—Medical corporations biggest thieves in America as measured by prosecutions under the False Claims Act:
http://www.taf.org/top20.htm
4-On unnecessary medical procedures in the US:
http://www.marketmed.org/avoidable.asp?fmmfont=fontsml#avoid_25
or
http://tinyurl.com/3dpqjx
“I don’t mean to be rude but if the person(s) who made these comments actually graduated from college then they really should consider suing that college for utterly failing to teach them, any critical thinking skills what-so-ever.”
Ad hominem attack.
Anonymous
“”I don’t mean to be rude but if the person(s) who made these comments actually graduated from college then they really should consider suing that college for utterly failing to teach them, any critical thinking skills what-so-ever.”
Ad hominem attack.”
Yes, yes it is. It is funny, as you you have noted, “Payne Hertz,” when people do the very things they claim to be against–and in the same post no less. Quiet Ironic.
We love RangelMD.com
” . . you are also a hypocrite for claiming the logical high ground while, in fact, cutting corners in your logic. They made no such pretenses.”
I was not aware that logic was the “high ground”. It’s just logic ,like spelling . . it’s either good or bad. It’s also not an argument for anything. I was just pointing out that the first anonymous comments used faulty logic.
The first comment is most certainly an ad hominem attack (“Ad Hominem” = “against the man”). Whether or not Kevin or RangelMD hate liberals or not is irrelevant to the argument (i.e. that the WHO rankings are not what we would consider a measure of health care quality). The issue of “liberals” in the RangelMD post is brought up as an explanation behind why someone would claim that the WHO rankings are a valid measure of health care system quality. But this is still not central to the argument.
Calling Kevin a “fat idiot” is just name calling.
In comment #3 it’s clear that the author calls into question the “quality” of US health care based on a single horrible case. Obviously the “quality” of an entire system cannot be significantly impacted by a single case ergo, this is not a representative example! This could also be a hasty generalization or a fallacy of insufficient sample size, etc.
But your point about this anonymous commenter making “no such pretenses” is absolutely correct. Essentially these comments amounted to a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Anonymous
“The first comment is most certainly an ad hominem attack (“Ad Hominem” = “against the man”). Whether or not Kevin or RangelMD hate liberals or not is irrelevant to the argument (i.e. that the WHO rankings are not what we would consider a measure of health care quality).”
Interesting, but by saying “I see, this is more of Kevin’s Obsessive Dislike of Michael More” I’m not making the argument about the WHO ranking, I’m making the argument that this is a post that proves the pattern of KevinMD’s dislike of Michael Moore.
“Calling Kevin a “fat idiot” is just name calling.”
You’ll note, though you didn’t, that I didn’t call KevinMD a “fat idiot.” Instead, I posited that would be an Ad Hominem. And yes, mere “name calling” is, in fact, an Ad Hominem. An Ad Homimen is an attack on the person that is not related to the argument. Of course, attacking the things a person says or does that are related to the argument do not constitute an Ad Hominem.
“Obviously the “quality” of an entire system cannot be significantly impacted by a single case ergo, this is not a representative example! “
You shouldn’t use them High Falutin’ latin terms like “ergo” unless you are going to actually use logic. Your conclusion does not follow your premises. Even if your statement that “the “quality” of an entire system cannot be significantly impacted by a single case” were true it does not follow that “this is not a representative example!” That is a non sequitur. You haven’t proven whether the example is, or isn’t representative.
If you are also Annon 6:04 PM, then you really shouldn’t try and use logic to make your points, you should stick to rhetorical devices where the flaws in your arguments are not so blatantly obvious and the self-contrdictory hypocrisy is less evident.
Lover of . . whatever
“I don’t mean to be rude but if the person(s) who made these comments actually graduated from college then they really should consider suing that college for utterly failing to teach them, any critical thinking skills what-so-ever.”
This is NOT an Ad hominem attack. This is a direct attack. This is a high brow way of saying that the commenter is of lower thinking skills not only for their use of an ad hominem attack but their repeated inability to understand what an ad hominem attack is.
An ad hominem attack is not an attack on someone or name calling or saying that someone is such and such. An ad hominem attack or counter argument is an attempt to reject a claim based on an irrelevant fact about the person making the claim. For example; Kevin and RangelMD are incorrect about the WHO rankings not being representative of quality health care because they hate liberals. Wrong. It doesn’t matter whether they hate or love liberals. This is irrelevant to the claim.
A circumstantial ad hominem attack is the assertion that a certain claim or argument is invalid just because the person making the claim is doing it out of self interests. For example; you can’t trust what doctors (or car salespersons) say because they are driven by profit. Wrong. The motivations of a person do not in any way affect the validity of what they say. Your doctor may tell you that he/she thinks you have cholecystitis and will need to have your gall bladder removed. If your doctor then tells you that he/she will make $1,000 dollars from this operation, does this mean that you DON’T need to have the operation? No, this doesn’t make sense but several people on this thread have already stated that doctors are not to be trusted because they are profit driven. I.e. what doctors claim is false because they will make money from their claim. This is a fallacy. It makes no sense, common or otherwise.
And now for the direct attack. You people are idiots.