Don't kill me....

But I think Michael was a bit harsh but justified in his attacking Dr. Gupta...

It isn't Gupta's job to talk about the politics of the war...

I thought he did some wonderful and needed reporting from the Navy Hospital Ship during the first few weeks of the conflict that was far superior to anything on any news network...

I know he is sponsored by big phamra and I know he is also sponsored by the insurance companies...

But I think he is beyond the wealth issue and does present clear, easy to understand medical reports that are far less breathy and emotional than any of the other Dr.'s on TV...

Having said that...

I love the way Michael went off on Wolfe...

MM was very good, sprinkled some humor even though he knows he is going to be vilified for his performance on CNN...

Also, I like the way he put the blame where it really is as far as the attack on HRC's first attempt at Health Care Reform and expressed hope that HRC wouldn't shy away from introducing National Health Care in her campaign...

To Wolfe's credit, he stood there and mostly took it without really trying to stop MM...

We shall see how the rest of that goes tomorrow...

Oh and if you had any remaining fuzzy feeling about Ditzy Dobbs because he occasionally attacks Bush, they should have been completely erased when he compared MM to Senor Hugo...

Dobbs has always been an embarrassment and is, in my mind, comparable to Grover Norquist...

Why he has a prime time news show is beyond me...

It's as bad as anything Faux puts out...

Nothing but an hour of him bloviating around a few shaky news reports...

So why do they act as if he's a reporter? If he's gonna walk around, pretending to be a reporter, he brings MM's wrath upon himself when he gets the facts wrong.

right simply because they cited different sources...

I, for one, who took some journalism classes, would want to know more about where these rankings come from...

Look, I don't take everything that Moore says as the gospel truth anymore than I take everything that anyone says as the gospel truth...

But I think MM presented a thought provoking look at the nations failing health care system that is important and will do much to liven up the debate...

As we saw tonight on CNN...

BTW, I had to wait over two months to see a pulmonary specialists and I have great insurance...

We have short waiting times only because of the fact we don't have those 47 million folks in the system...

they said had longer wait times were ELECTIVE.

My guess is that the U.S. would be WAY DOWN below these other countries if the overall wait times for all potential patients seeking care were measured.

The last time me or mine were in the ER it was 11 1/2 hours in one ER to NOT EVEN GET SEEN by a Doc (and still got charged) followed by 4 hours the next day -- for an acute gastric problem. That's the standard that passes for "health care" in this benighted country.


Gupta should be ashamed to lend his reputation and voice to a hit piece riddled with FACTUAL errors. EVERY "FACT" that they said Moore got wrong -- THEY GOT WRONG! A shameful, shameful piece.

Moore is probably the BEST fact checker there is. I'd trust ANY FACT he included in one of his movies over any of the MSM.

Its about people, mostly kids. MM makes that evident in SICKO, main street media physicians merely spin whatever study is supplied to them.

So in order to keep my health insurance, I have to stay put...

But starting with medicare and working outward will be a pretty good place to start...

through this crazy quilt of coverage, no coverage etc. Sometimes I think healthcare will be the blueprint for what our energy policies and practices will be when we are running on empty.

For the sake of the future generations...

Anecdotal evidence is worthless.

Allowing emotion to influence one's political judgement is never a good idea. The objective of a healthcare system is to make as many people as well off as possible, and the way to work what achieves that is through statistics. Getting emotional about the plight of the people the system is failing actively hampers that, because you can never get equally emotional about all the different costs to different people.

The best healthcare system in the world is going to tragically and avoidably fail a few people.

The only meaningful way of judging whether one approach to healthcare will be better than another is through statistics.

Qualitative and quantitative research serve different purposes.

Quantitative research can describe a situation and make predictions for future outcomes, but qualitative research can provide reasons as to why and how something happens.

"Anecdotal evidence is worthless."

Really? I guess Congress should give up pursuing testimony from Harriet Miers, Sara Taylor, Karl Rove, etc. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Quantitative, can be used statistically as long as you have the right population to draw from...

I think that Anecdotal evidence is more unsolicited and therefor less valuable to research...

Still, MM uses AE to set a tone for the picture which is his right as a film maker...

Ad as long as you know that going in, you can take much more going out...

Was that a typo?

Thanks for the catch...

Yea, and I'm an accountant too....

Oy...

Review: Research Design, Falsification, and the Qualitative-Quantitative Divide

Reviewed Work:
Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. by Gary King; Robert O. Keohane; Sidney Verba

James A. Caporaso

The American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 2. (Jun., 1995), pp. 457-460.

KKV strenuously argue that the same rules of inference
apply to qualitative and quantitative research.
While I am inclined to agree, it is because I share the
authors' definition of qualitative research as research
based on in-kind rather than in-degrees differences.
With this distinction, variance can be of two types:
across categories (e.g., types of government, gender)
and across quantities of the same variable (income,
degree of labor repression). In measurement theory,
qualities are represented as nominal variables, and
quantities, as ordinal, interval, and ratio measures.
Qualitative variation is not variation in magnitude,
quantitative variation is. This characterization shows
that it is not really numbers that are at issue (nominal
measures are assigned numbers, too) but the issue of
magnitude versus quality.

With this definition of qualitative research in place,
the authors easily show that a sound qualitative
research strategy requires attention to the same rules
of inference as a quantitative strategy ("if x, then y" is
not logically different from "as x increases, y increases").
But qualitative work can be conceived differently
and in ways that are more resistant to KKV's
reconciliation project.

For some, qualitative research signifies something
different from explanations of in-kind variation. Indeed,
the whole idea of systematic research harnessed
to the goal of explanation is put into question.
Thick description and interpretation may serve as
ends, not merely as spadework preparatory to explanation.
Scholars may be interested in empathetic
understanding, the interpretation of meanings, and
detailed investigation of single (nonvarying) cases.
Some of the book's arguments (e.g., the rules of
descriptive inference) still hold. Others (e.g., the
rules of causal inference) are less relevant, despite the
authors' attempt to square Geertzian analysis with
their project (pp. 38-41).

A related point is that KKV's arguments about
differences and similarities between qualitative and
quantitative research take place in a variable-centered
world. This is not the only starting point. A variable-centered
approach is already one in which variable
properties have been abstracted from things, concrete
names, and places. In the classroom, I find that the
most difficult argument to make is not the unity of
qualitative and quantitative research once a variable-centered
model has been accepted but how one
makes the transition from instances and concretely
experienced sense data to variables. On this crucial
issue, I know of no methodological guides. Between
"Jumbo the elephant sliding down a grassy hill at
Gasworks Park and "a certain mass moving down
an inclined plane with a given coefficient of friction"
there is a gap.' Neither logic nor observation obliges
us to accept the second statement once we accept the
first. Yet the leap has to be taken to reach the abstract
world of variables. Hitler's Reich as totalitarian regime;
Austria, Norway, and Sweden as small, open,
corporatist social democracies; and Brazil, Argentina,
and South Korea as late-developing bureaucratic authoritarian
polities all represent examples of concept
formation not forced by deductive or inductive
logic (assuming one believes in the latter).

Moore is attempting to do the latter.

If you're completely clear that what you're doing is presenting a worthless argument in order to manipulate foolish people into supporting a position for which there also exist better arguments, fair enough, but I would worry that a lot of people lose sight of that and come to allow "look at little Jimmy who has been the victim of a tragedy, we must do something for him" to influence their judgement.

They put a human face on the problem you are talking about. Needless to say they should be backed up statistically, but that isn't what moves people.

When I say "anecdotal evidence is I worthless", I mean "When making up your mind about an issue you should discount anecdotal evidence and refer solely to statistically significant evidence".

My impression is that you are using it to mean "advancing anecdotal evidence in support of a case is a worthless or futile endeavour", which I agree is not true, although I wish it was.

Stop using rhetorical tools trying to turn what we all have experienced into "Few".


It demeans the experience of the American people


Moore isn't even the 90th person telling you something is wrong.

You insult your own intelligence by trying to call this "FEW"

There are three hundred million Americans. 90 anecdotes is few. 90 thousand anecdotes isn't that many. Everything you, your mother and everyone either of you has ever met has experienced first hand does not represent a statistically significant sample of American health care.

I am not for a minute denying that "something is wrong" with the American health care system - to wit, that there isn't one. I *am* saying that the way to analyse what is wrong, what isn't, and what can be done is through statistics, not through anecdote and personal experience.

The only person here insulting my intelligence is you.

Very few of us will ever have one, but any of us could have one. That's why we regard fire protection as a public good and require all property owners to pitch in to pay for it. No reason why health care should be any different.

There are never going to be large number of health care anecdotes because most people will never get expensively sick. If you want statistics, here are some--

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/10/EDG6QQ4VGD1.DTL

What country endures such long waits for medical care that even one of its top insurers has admitted that care is "not timely" and people "initially diagnosed with cancer are waiting over a month, which is intolerable?"

If you guessed Canada, guess again. The answer is the United States.

Scrambling for a response to the popular reaction to Michael Moore's "SiCKO" and a renewed groundswell for a publicly financed, guaranteed single-payer health care solution, such as SB840, the big insurers and their defenders have pounced on Canada, pulling out all of their old tales of people waiting years in soup kitchen-type lines for medical care.

But, here's the dirty little secret that they won't tell you. Waiting times in the United States are as bad as or worse than Canada. And, unlike the United States, in Canada no one is denied needed medical care, referrals or diagnostic tests due to cost, pre-existing conditions or because it wasn't pre-approved.

U.S. waiting times are the elephant in the room few critics care to address.

But, listen to what the chief medical officer of Aetna had to say in March.

Speaking to the Aetna Investor's Conference 2007, Troy Brennan let these pearls drop: The U.S. "health care system is not timely."

You are basically saying that 7200 deaths is no reason for concern.

That is twice the amount of people who have died in 9-11

Or approximately the amount that died in Katrina.

Or double the amount of dead soldiers in Iraq.

or double the amount of soldier killed at Pearl Harbor.



Dude these are AMERICANS. Your neighbors. 7200 deaths have been enough to get us into two wars.

Apparently you can't do your own math. It's been a pleasure spoon feeding you into an adult opinion.

Please try and respond to what I actually say, rather than inventing positions for me to hold.

I *am* saying that 7200 deaths (an 8% mortality rate per year is a spectacularly high one, but never mind) is a relatively small fraction of the 5 million or so Americans (they're not my neighbours, incidentally, and I would suggest that "these are AMERICANS", with the implication that I should care more about them than if they weren't, is a relatively contemptible sentiment) who die each year, and that basing a health service on the needs of those 7200 people more than on the needs of all the others is grossly irresponsible.

I'm also not, as you appear to think, denying that the American health service, or rather lack of one, is a "cause for concern". My claim is that anecdote is no way of measuring that, of deciding how big a concern it is, or of suggesting solutions.

For what it's worth, if your health service only let 7200 people die every year I would say that the only cause for concern was that they were probably resorting to miracle working to do it, and that the second coming was probably at hand.

7200 people have been enough to get you into two wars, because people killed by other people always attract more media attention than deaths through natural causes. I don't know how many lives could have been saved if the money spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had been spent on health care, but I suspect the answers lie in the low hundreds of thousands if it had been spent on health care in America, and the millions - possibly quite high millions - if it had been spent on health care in the third world. You appear to place more faith in the ability of the American government to value defence spending against aid and health care than I do.

This is 7200 on top of normal mortality.

Since when is not being able to get treatment "Natural Causes"? In my world this is called Gross malpractice.

And Moore DOESN't use just anecdotes, he uses the Health stats, straight from the governments involved.

So the entire exercise here seems to be because you are mistaken on Moore's approach. Did you see this movie?


The fact that this is happening to Americans IS significant due to the fact that we have a covenant with our government to "Protect the general welfare." Please familiarize yourself with the founding documents, it's all in the Federalist Papers.

And since you're not American, why do you give a damn?

Why are you on a board messing with us?

And Has Sicko even opened in your country for you to see it?

Have you seen it?

Or are you just going on what you have read rather than experienced?

I would say come back and comment when you have some first hand experience with our system, but I don't wish harm onto strangers. I would have to pray you survive the experience.

If Americans WERE your neighbors you'd be able to ask them. Everyone of them would be able to tell you some

I happen to think we are all "neighbours" here on Earth. Even the ones who use Commonwealth spellings.

I'm *not* attacking Sicko specifically. I haven't seen it, and have no particular desire to see it. I've been attacking the use of anecdotal evidence as opposed to statistics, as advocated in post #4. If Sicko refrains from doing that, fair enough; many other sources don't.

Not being able to get treatment *is* natural causes, I'm afraid. Health-care, like most of the rest of modern civilisation, is deeply unnatural; the natural state of man is nasty, brutish and short, and involves dying of just about everything you can think of, including many things we now can and do cure. Not dying of TB or smallpox is deeply unnatural.

If you use the term "neighbours" to include everyone on Earth in any context other than sci-fi, you deprive it of all meaning.

I'd say that "Sicko" is a rousing success, regardless of the box office numbers. :)

Hopefully all of the talk leads to some meaningful improvement, if not solutions.

"Fudged" means that the numbers are incorrect, and even incorrect on purpose. "Fudge" means cheat, or exaggerate. Those numbers Moore uses are not "fudged".

Secondly, "SiCKO" does not rely only on anecdotal evidence. You did see the movie, right? Insurance companies deny approximately 10% of legitmate claims in order to meet their target goals. There are loads of statistics in the movie. The personal stories are not there to substitute for facts.

And didn't Gupta come back and apolgize...

Still, I think Gupta is one of the best corispondants on CNN...

BTW, I have tons of experience, both personal and professional, with the fucked-up health care system...

O'Reilly and some others would have been cutting him off and interrupting. At least Wolf let MM read him the riot act and took it like a man.

and I missed the rest.

Sanjay Gupta is a very capable doctor who provides good reports about medical issues.

And I thought that Moore went off attacking Blitzer for what he said - or not - 3 years ago about F911.