EDITORIAL: 

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

            I’m suspicious of a lot of the figures thrown around in the media, especially when they cite “government sources.”  Don’t you sometimes wonder if the unemployment statistics aren’t based on numbers of people applying for unemployment insurance, and leave out all the ones whose benefits have run out and all those who have given up looking for work?  The figures certainly don’t include all the (former) middle class folks who have been downsized and outsourced until they are now casual laborers, handymen, burger flippers or ’phone book deliverers. 

            I’m particularly suspicious of one figure that has been around for several years now.  “There are 46 million Americans without health insurance.”  Really?  Every day fewer employers offer health insurance as an employee benefit.  Each day the costs of unreimbursed care provided by hospitals and other care-givers rise.  Each year the cost of health care takes a bigger bite out of the GDP as the cost of health insurance premiums rises by double digits, and the insurance companies, drug companies and other profiteers get fatter and their lobbies get more powerful.  Half of all bankruptcies are the result of health care debts, and the Bush administration’s answer is to make it harder to go bankrupt!  With all that going on, do you really believe that only 46,000,000 Americans are without health insurance year after year?  Couldn’t it be 60,000,000 or maybe 80,000,000 by now?  And wouldn’t even 46 million be too many?

            Call me a skeptic, but I can’t help wondering about those rosy reports about kids being signed up for health insurance.  Why can’t we find out how many are signed up but then their parents find that they can’t keep paying premiums?  How many are still covered after a year or two?  How many actually get preventive care, and how many fall through the cracks?   How healthy is it likely to be for a child if everyone else in the family has little or no access to care?  Why do we have a program called Healthy Families, when it’s only designed to provide outpatient care for kids whose uninsured parents have to pay premiums out of their poverty level wages?  Are we supposed to be encouraged because we’re told that “only” 80,000 Orange County kids are uninsured? Or when the state legislature and the governor agree to cut the $23 million for kids’ health care coverage from the mega-billion state budget?

            I’d like to be skeptical about some statistics that are probably all too accurate.  The Institutes of Medicine tell us 18,000 people under 65 die each year for lack of timely and appropriate health care.  The numbers of deaths and injuries on our highways, and how many can be attributed to alcohol abuse also come to mind.  Then think about the numbers of prisoners in our jails and prisons (more per capita than in any country in the world) and the wildly fluctuating and unreliable statistics about how many destitute, homeless and mentally ill people roam our city streets.  How many American children go to bed hungry, and how many are obese, and at risk for diabetes?  These are some of the grim statistics that should be addressed by our social policies, but they are not. 

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