Piling On...

Okay, just one more post on that silly Commonweath Fund study (and its recent followup). Seems that the CF got caught playing a little fast and loose with how they weighted the criteria used in assessing the relative quality of nations' health care systems. John Stossel comes to the rescue (again!), pointing out that having EMR (electronic medical records) is not as important as, you know, saving actual lives:

"The proportion of patients who say they got infected at a hospital counts about the same in the "quality" measure as the proportion of doctors who use automated computer systems to remind them to tell patients their test results. Those things aren't equal in my book."

As a bonus, John quotes FoIB (and Cato Institute's Director of Health Policy Studies) Michael Cannon, who pretty much nails the CF "study" right on the noggin:

"The report does nothing more than reveal which nation does the worst job of satisfying the subjective preferences of the people who conducted this study."

That's gonna leave a mark.