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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Archie Meeties who wrote (8509)	8/21/2009 12:17:42 AM
From: Little Joe	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Thomas Sowell's view. realclearpolitics.com lj

To: Archie Meeties who wrote (8509)	8/21/2009 8:58:51 AM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Respond to of 42652

Just making stuff up here... The question is whether deaths from alcohol related accidents are attributable to a failure of the health care system. You obviously think so or else you wouldn't be trying to justify their inclusion in the WHO conclusions. Alcoholism is a mental health problem with physical health implications for both the alcoholic and his victims. Likewise addiction to other drugs. And other mental illnesses. Accidental deaths result. Murders also result. Logic that leads you to consider alcohol related accidental deaths to be attributable to a failure of the health care system would also lead you to consider that for all mental health related accidental deaths. My use of the word "all" was excessive but I would think that the majority of accidental deaths could be traced back to some mental health problem left uncured by the health care system therefore attributable to the failure of the health care system. So, if you think that a strawman, perhaps I have misunderstood you. Perhaps you don't really think that alcohol related accidents are attributable to the failure of the health care system. Or perhaps your rationale for that is not what I have inferred. If you have some other rationale, then perhaps you would explain it. That statistical rate doesn't necessarily mean that we should call an individual death not an accident for statistical purposes. There are so many categorizations we use have been around forever and may have lost some utility but we're stuck with them. I assume that "accidental death" derives from the determinations of coroners to differentiate it from both killings and fatal health failures, which is useful. Something has to go on the death certificate and be counted. As with so many of these frameworks, though, they either fail to evolve or are utilized outside their historical roots. Just this morning I was thinking about fruits and vegetables. You find tomatoes in the vegetable section of the grocery store, not the fruit section, even though tomatoes are technically fruits. As are olives and eggplants and avocados. In common parlance, though, we use fruit to mean a sweet edible plant and vegetable to mean a savory one. We think of eggplant as a vegetable. So our biology books and our grocery shelves are out of sync. Now your epidemiologists come along and want to lump alcohol related accidental deaths in with the fatal health failures. That reframing is not at all likely to prevail. There's just too much investment in the original categorization. So you're stuck with leaving them as accidental deaths which would mean adjusting the WHO data to remove them from the list of health care system failures even recognizing that there is a health care system influence.