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

To: i-node who wrote (11456)	11/18/2009 8:22:32 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 42652

It isn't a shortage of data -- there probably isn't a field more loaded with statistics than the medical field. The problem is one of selecting appropriate criteria, which nobody really agrees on. What I meant was that you and I don't have the data because those doing the reports have messed up the criteria to the point where we can't extract what we need from it. Sure, better data are there but those charged with compiling it are corrupting it and the underlying data are not available to us. However, I question the quality of the underlying data. We really don't have good ways to measure medical performance. We still count procedures, for example, rather than outcomes. I'm not sure that if we handed the data over to those who would apply criteria differently we'd get anything more useful. It would be less biased against the US but not necessarily any more useful for measuring success.