Topic: Worst Study Ever - World Health Report 2000

[Pandora]

I wanted to have a record of this here, for future reference, and for facts when the Left yet again, as they ever will, cites it as definitive and for why our "healthycare system" was broken.

The World Health Organization’s World Health Report 2000, which ranked the health-care systems of nearly 200 nations, stands as one of the most influential social-science studies in history.

For the past decade, it has been the de facto basis for much of the discussion of the health-care system in the United States, routinely cited in public discourse by members of government and policy experts. Its most notorious finding—that the United States ranked a disastrous 37th out of the world’s 191 nations in “overall performance”—provided supporters of President Barack Obama’s transformative health-care legislation with a data-driven argument for swift and drastic reform, particularly in light of the fact that the U.S. spends more on health than any other nation.

... In fact, World Health Report 2000 was an intellectual fraud of historic consequence—a profoundly deceptive document that is only marginally a measure of health-care performance at all. The report’s true achievement was to rank countries according to their alignment with a specific political and economic ideal—socialized medicine—and then claim it was an objective measure of “quality.”

H/T American Thinker

[Glock32]

Oh yes, it bears all the same intellectual pedigree as the likewise oft-cited IPCC report on "climate change".  For the longest time now, one of their chief lines of ridicule against religious people (well, more specifically against Christians) is to mock what they dismiss as circular reasoning whenever one points to the Bible as an authority governing this or that moral issue. How is political Leftism that different from being a religion unto itself? They make allegations, then to lend authority to their claim they point to these grand works like the IPCC Report or this World Health Report that, conveniently, they themselves penned.

Their response to this would be that, unlike a religious text, these Reports are simply consensus among leading scientists and based upon objective data. And that of course is hogwash. Methodological errors, interpretive errors, selective inclusion of supporting data, and leaps of logic abound in these publications. "Error" is an exceptionally generous word to use for this.

[Libertas]

I long for the day when all these psychopaths are removed from the planet...

[ToddF]

That's old news to me.  I already knew car crashes and murders dragged down our life expectancy.  I also know the US being the only country in the world that treats a still-birth as a dead infant, drags down our infant mortality numbers.  Some countries wait until a baby is days or weeks old, before they would count as a death, if they die.

Definitely old news to me, which is why every fraud quote such.

[AlanS]

I also know the US being the only country in the world that treats a still-birth as a dead infant, drags down our infant mortality numbers.  Some countries wait until a baby is days or weeks old, before they would count as a death, if they die.

Do abortions count as dead infants?