Investor's Business Daily was the outfit
that claimed in an editorial demonizing nationalized healthcare:
"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have
a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life
of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially
worthless."
Of course this was a complete lie, since Steven Hawking
is a native of England and has received all of his healthcare from England's
nationalized program.
As the Columbia Journalism Review reported:
This is sick, dishonest stuff, so it’s sweet that Hawking
himself calls it out, telling a TPM blogger “I wouldn’t be alive today
if it weren’t for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high quality
treatment without which I would not have survived.”
But Investor's Business Daily’s correction creates
another problem. Here is its entire text:
Editor’s Note: This version corrects the original editorial
which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University
of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.
It has removed the Hawking reference from the story (even,
apparently, in Factiva, which doesn’t have it either), but short-arms the
correction, which should have read something like: “This version corrects
the original editorial which falsely implied that physicist Stephen Hawking
would be dead as a doornail if he lived in the UK and had to use the National
Health. Hawking has lived in the UK his entire life, and as of press time,
is still alive.
In my dream world they’d also tack on an “Also, this basically
kills the premise of our entire editorial, which never should have been
written. We resign in disgrace.”
Alas, that’s not going to happen. But Investor's Business
Daily ought to go ahead and correct the false information contained
in its quote of the notorious Betsy McCaughey, who says the House’s bill
“compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years,” which
is an easy-to-figure-out fact error, as The Atlantic’s Conor Clarke
makes plain.
In other words, the people at Investor's Business Daily
are a bunch of liars, particularly when it comes to fabricating information
about nationalized healthcare plans, and Obamacare in particular.
Details on those percentages are forthcoming, but Investor's
Business Daily's track record has established 0 credibility for anything
they say about progressive politics. I think we'll find that those
percentages are completely bogus. Michael Moore's Sicko has
already blown the lid off such nonsense.
BTW the foregoing reasons are why you will never see those
stats in "the mainstream media" (non-Fox, that is).
More examples of falsehoods issued by Investor's
Business Daily WRT the Healthcare Bill:
Private
Insurance Not Outlawed - Factcheck Report on Investor's Business
Daily's claims
BTW the opener in that bulk email lie says: A recent "Investor's
Business Daily" article provided very interesting statistics from a survey
by the United Nations
International Health Organization.
There's no such organization. In fact, if you Google
by name, you find reports that the org doesn't exist, along with multiple
copies of the bogus email.
One of the hits is from the Snopes message board.
It indicates a few related areas of interest (e.g. the WHO database):
Snopes
Forum - Health statistics from Investors' Business Daily
The reporting has been necessarily fragmented. That's
mainly because the information is so spotty. One objective
seems unlikely: To verify that the numbers in that message are correct.
However, the evidentiary burden must be carried by the assertion of those
numbers not the falsification.
Here's something interesting from a Myspace discussion
of this topic. Note that the author also could not find an org called
"United Nations International Health Organization," but did find the detailed
survey by WHO that does not corroborate the statistics in the Investor's
Business Daily survey. Unlike the Snopes discussion, Jennifer
Beahan provides a link to the survey...
To all who have read this post or received this
email regarding statistics about health care,
What is the source of these statistics?
I tried to look up the original article that is mentioned
from Investor's Business Daily - but the article does not exist, I couldn't
even find anything that even vaguely resembled this information.
I also tried to locate the "United Nations International
Health Organization" to find the original survey which is referenced -
but the survey and the organization do not appear to exist. The only references
I could find were to the same statistics sent in the email that were re-posted
on numerous websites - all of which are lacking in source information for
the statistics (by source information I refer to the title of the survey,
the survey author(s) and publication date, the location of the complete
survey results, etc.).
The actual health organization run by the United Nations
is the "World Health Organization." The World Health Organization does
have a very in-depth survey that they published, but I could not find any
numbers that matched the statistics listed in the email that was sent -
here is the link
to the survey if you would like to review it yourself.
Statistics can be very valuable, but are also very easy
to misuse to show the conclusions of whomever is drafting the statistics.
There are also quite a few missing pieces of information
to help the reader decide whether or not the conclusions are valid - sample
size, demographics of survey respondents, types of controls used when gathering
information to prevent skewing by individuals or the researchers themselves...
to name a few things.
Whoever created these statistics was hoping to make them
look real by referencing a reputable business magazine and the United Nations,
but a few minutes of searching on the internet very quickly disproved the
validity of this information.
If you doubt me - please research it for yourself. If
you find more information please send it to me.
I would caution all of you to critically examine these
types of posts/emails that get forwarded from person to person as they
may have had (at some point) grounding in a study that may or may not have
had the appropriate rigor to be valid. But once the statistics and facts
are separated from the source and the research to show why they are valid,
one must be very careful in accepting the conclusions that are drawn from
any statistics.
You should also locate the primary source of the information
to verify whether or not the conclusions are indeed true - if you can't
find the primary source (original survey or article, etc.) that is a big
problem, and unless you can find corroborating evidence (another study
that says the same thing, etc.) you probably shouldn't believe the conclusions
being presented to you.
