Who needs food?

Here's a story from NPR purporting to compare Britain's National Healthcare System with healthcare in the US. It actually compares only two cases, one in the US and one in the UK. That would be okay if they were used to illustrate statistical data, but there is no such data provided. The reporter, Joanne Silberner, instead tries to create the appearance of statistics by offering a "scorecard":

So the scorecard comes to this.

Linda Oatley of Buckland, England, had several months' delay in getting coverage for a new treatment. She also has to pay a small fee for weekly physical therapy. Overall, she's happy with the National Health Service.

"In the end, if you ask the right questions, go to the right places, you can get the care you need from the get-go," she says.

And the scorecard for Jeff Rubin? A year and a half of cutting drug dosages, a repossessed house and bankruptcy.

A few years ago, he wouldn't have supported a British-style system, with its slower drug approvals and limited ability to pick your own doctors.

Now, he feels differently. He says his healthy friends might not agree, but the free care from the start that Linda Oatley got and the ability to focus on his illness and not his finances sound pretty good.

Overall, it's a long piece full of meaningless color that could easily have made space for real information, but NPR is more interested in propagandizing.

Ironically I encountered this piece in the UK's Daily Mail within a day or two of the NPR report. The juxtaposition is pretty devastating. Here are the first few paragraphs, which demolish the "argument" of the NPR piece.

At least 30,000 patients were left starving on NHS wards last year, despite ministers’ pledges to make proper nutrition in hospitals a priority.

Last year, Health Minister Ivan Lewis admitted that some patients were given a single scoop of mash as a meal.

Others were ‘tortured’ with trays of food placed just beyond their reach while nurses said they were too busy to help them eat.

And now, official figures show that between 2005 and 2007, there was an 88 per cent rise in reported cases of poor nutrition leading to a serious deterioration in a patient’s health.

Last year, NHS whistleblowers reported 29,138 such errors to the National Patient Safety Agency – up from 15,473 in 2005.

They refer to elderly patients who are not properly fed and those given the wrong types of food, causing their health to worsen.

Let's do a little editing to make the NPR story more accurate:

A few years ago, [Jeff Rubin] wouldn't have supported a British-style system, with its slower drug approvals, limited ability to pick your own doctors and starvation.

But that wouldn't suit Silberner's agenda, would it.

I love this comment beneath the Daily Mail story:

Most of you are missing the point. You are blaming the inept nurses etc.

The government caused inept nurses and the current lack of money, decent food and lack of proper care. A government gets what it pays for. What it wants, it gets.

If, on the other hand, you consider that current hospital climate results in the death of many elderly pensioners, "useless eaters", then it all begins to make sense.

Doesn't it.