CNN: Opinion disguised as analysis

Posted by Marc Hodak on August 13, 2007 under Collectivist instinct | 5 Comments to Read

CNN reports that U.S. life expectancy lags behind other countries’. This sounds like an article about a scientific health study, but it isn’t. When one starts to read it, one quickly sees that this is a puff piece devoted to a particular policy perspective riding a thin surface of statistics.

The article starts with this paragon of objectivity:

“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation sounds like a research organization. They claim to aspire to that image. From their web-site:

“The Institute will focus its competencies to pursue research, education, and evaluation across different topical areas.”

“The Institute strives to be the lighthouse standard for high-quality information on health that is valid, comparable, comprehensible, and freely available in the public domain.”

Yet their web site does not provide a single study, not even the Census Bureau study (poorly) cited in the CNN article in which Dr. Murray is extensively quoted. The Institute describes its areas of work, yet provides not one example of said work. The Institute “stands by the principle that information should be freely available to all who wish to use it,” but provides no information at all. This doesn’t look like a research foundation with much of a track record, but it’s apparently good enough for CNN.

Given the way Dr. Murray is spouting off about policy, I doubt that his institute will contribute anything useful to the discourse on health care. For example, the highest life expectancies are to be found in places like Japan, Singapore, and the tiny countries of Andorra and San Marino. For anyone with a decent grasp of geography and demographics, these countries stand out as having relatively homogenous populations. Is it possible that demographic differences in diverse countries might have a material impact on aggregate results? A credible researcher would ask and answer that question before you could even raise it–certainly before speculating about policy differences at the root of aggregate results.

So, let’s do what Dr. Murray wouldn’t, and tease out a couple of facts. First, the article notes that blacks live shorter lives than whites*. The average U.S. longevity is, according to this article, 77.9 years, and the longevity of blacks is 73.3 years. From other sources, one would know that similar disparities exists between Hispanics and Native Americans, making up 15 percent of the population, versus the average American. Taking apart just these demographic pieces, what remains is an average longevity for mostly Asians and Whites that would easily place the U.S. in league with Japan and most of Western Europe.

So, I would like to see a report on how Americans fare by demographic type versus their cousins in ancestral lands. We know, for instance, that African Americans live far longer than Africans in Africa, even those nations not ravaged by AIDS. Mexican Americans almost certainly live longer than Mexicans in Mexico. Do French Americans live longer than the French in France? I”m not sure, but several of my French relatives in need of specialized care have come to the U.S. for treatments. That’s at once telling, and a potential source of muddying the comparison. How about Japanese-Americans or German-Americans versus their native counterparts? Is it possible that the American cousins of Asians and Europeans actually live longer? If so, would all the people clamoring for socialized medicine in the U.S. begin clamoring for market-based health care in the rest of the World? None of us may live long enough to see that.

* see parenthetical comments below the fold

* The article, unsurprisingly, quotes an expert speculating about disparate “social conditions” as the source of the black-white difference in longevity. I don’t doubt that there is a disparity, or that it contributes to differences in mortality, but I would love to hear someone trying to complain about the social “disparities” that lead men to die much sooner than women–a longevity gap that exceeds that between any pair of races or ethnicities.