Chris - you're sort of right.
I did not "just make it up" - and resent your automatic assumption that I did because I was agreeing with JEV on this one point. I've noticed that you don't complain when I agree with you on things, so why call me a liar on this one where I was being pretty non-political other than agreeing on a specific point with someone you butt heads with on a regular basis? I
was, hovever, agreeing with information I had heard, but had not researched myself, so I did a quick Google.
Also - the BBC is still in the business of selling their point of view, just like any other news organization. I do not believe they were "tricked" into reporting incorrect information. I think they used statistics (the art of lying with numbers as facts) to present a picture that made European medical services/costs look good and current US practice as less than good -- a pretty typical thing from ANY ethnocentric point of view.
I don't see any difference in their reporting the facts they way they want to interpret them to someone on our side of the pond who is not keen on the idea of more government control in our health care system to cite the "apples to oranges" argument, such as how differing standards on what counts as viable birth can skew reported infant mortality rates.
From Wikipedia -- granted, not the "best" source, but the easiest to find info on in a short amount of time, like when on lunch break:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality
There is discussion in the article that perinatal viability begins at 22 weeks according to WHO -- which is the standard the US follows for reporting infant mortality, so this is likely where the argument comes from.
"The
World Health Organization (WHO) defines a live birth as any born human being who demonstrates independent signs of life, including breathing, voluntary muscle movement, or heartbeat."
snip
"Another challenge to comparability is the practice of counting frail or premature infants who die before the normal due date as miscarriages (spontaneous abortions) or those who die during or immediately after childbirth as stillborn. Therefore, the quality of a country's documentation of
perinatal mortality can matter greatly to the accuracy of its infant mortality statistics.
This point is reinforced by the demographer Ansley Coale, who finds dubiously high ratios of reported stillbirths to infant deaths in Hong Kong and Japan in the first 24 hours after birth, a pattern that is consistent with the high recorded sex ratios at birth in those countries and suggests not only that many female infants who die in the first 24 hours are misreported as stillbirths rather than infant deaths but also that those countries do not follow WHO recommendations for the reporting of live births and infant deaths.[12]"
Lastly - I think I'm done with anything but fluff on the forums for a while -- both sides of the political spectrum on the forum seem to have lost their perspective in the past year. There doesn't seem to be much room for rational discussion, as it's beeing crowded out by mud slinging from both sides.
I'll keep reading, but if the price for trying to participate in a discussion is being called a lair for disagreeing with one side or the other (or in my case, quite often both sides) then I don't need to ante up.
