This is a follow up post to the one I posted on ZBlogs yesterday (you'll need to click the link twice). In that post, I noted three lies spread by the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute:
- The US doesn't spend a higher than expected proportion of its GDP per capita on health care
- US life expectancy is #1 in the world if you adjust for violent deaths
- Medicare's administrative overhead is higher, or at least not much lower, than private insurance overhead
The second example especially has, as far as I can tell, slipped mostly under the radar of progressives even though the study it's based on is literally just a fraud concocted by American Enterprise Institute "researchers" who tried to pass off a completely hypothetical calculation as indicating something about violent deaths in the real world.
This is the exact same statistic that Betsy McCaughey cited on the Daily Show. But when she did, almost nobody apparently knew that the study was definitively refuted as long as two years ago.
The third example has also misled people, although I think progressives mostly realize it's bull. But a lot of other people don't, including many intellectuals who count themselves as being very "informed." Yes, they are informed--with Heritage Foundation falsehoods, that is.
Plus, this nonsense is cited by the insurance industry as proof that health insurance in the United States should remain for-profit.
I am not sure what to do about this. I don't know how to make the media call out these lies. In our current media environment, a study can be completely refuted in 2007, and then, two years later, it's cited on big talk shows and the media completely forgets the refutation ever happened.
I guess the best thing I can recommend specifically in this post is to join the alternative media site ZBlogs as a Sustainer. Z Magazine is currently in dire financial straits and desperately needs support. It had to reduce the size of the October issue due to lack of funds and reportedly may fold up as soon as January 2010 if donors don’t help. If we lose this alternative, non-corporate left wing magazine, in my view it would be a huge setback for trying to build a more honest media.
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