Exaggerated data, lazy argument

An average of 280 children under 5 drown every year in swimming pools; that's about five actual children a week. Using the logic of Juan Figueroa of the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, pools should be outlawed because "one life to lose is too many."

Mr. Figueroa's demagoguery came in response to a report that claimed three (statistical) adults die a week in Connecticut for lack of health insurance. Reports The Hartford Courant: "Families USA estimates that 150 Connecticut adults died in 2006 due to a lack of insurance, and FBI statistics show 108 murders in the state that year." Translation: What's happening is criminal.

Families USA, a leading advocate of taxpayer-funded health care, said 209,000 (11 percent) of the state's 1.9 million adults were uninsured in 2006, and 150 died because they lacked insurance. It's a tossup whether its data or methodology is more flawed.

The state Office of Health Care Access says 136,000 adults were uninsured in 2006. But 44 percent were uninsured by choice and 25 percent were noncitizens, so the discussion is really about roughly 42,000 people (2.2 percent of all adults) who might have benefited from universal health care. Extrapolating Families USA's calculations, the number of statistical deaths was really 0.58 a week, but even that number is vastly inflated.

Families USA relied on an Institute of Medicine formula that a Health Research Service analysis, which otherwise sympathized with the institute's cause, concluded was based on wild exaggerations that made the "magnitude of the estimated effect of insurance on mortality ... too large to be credible."

In addition, Families USA wrongly presumed the uninsured forego care when they are injured or ill, but hospital administrators know all too well how the uninsured consider emergency rooms their free health clinics. Further, the group believes socialized medicine is superior to the American health-care system; many in Britain and Canada living under the tyranny of universal health care would beg to differ.

Families USA, Mr. Figueroa et al. would have Connecticut spend hundreds of millions more annually on socialized medicine based on exaggerated statistics and a lazy argument: "If it saves one life, it's worth it."

The fact is, they can't document a single death irrefutably caused by the lack of health insurance and can't guarantee that inevitable health-care rationing under a government-run program wouldn't be deadlier than going without coverage.

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Cancer coverup in Australia

The Queensland government does not want the failings of their country hospitals to become known

Life-saving cancer research is being blocked by Queensland Government restrictions on scientists gaining access to a register of sufferers throughout the state. The Cancer Council of Queensland has launched unprecedented legal action in Brisbane's Supreme Court for access to the register to enable independent study of the disease, including blocked work into why survival rates are lower in regional and rural Queensland. Scientists believe the study may embarrass Queensland Health because it is likely to reveal detection and treatment standards are failing outside of Brisbane.

Queensland is the only state in Australia, and one of the few jurisdictions in the Western world, where researchers require case-by-case approval to access the cancer register for the development of prevention and treatment strategies. Queensland Health has refused to release localised cancer statistics and has failed to fund the collation of data on the stages that cancers are being discovered in different areas.

The battle has emerged as suspected cancer clusters - involving the ABC's Brisbane studios and firefighters in north Queensland - are being investigated by the Government. Documents obtained by The Australian show that some of Australia's leading scientists - including former Australian of the Year Ian Frazer - have repeatedly appealed to Premier Anna Bligh and Health Minister Stephen Robertson to grant routine access to the data.

The Cancer Council of Queensland - which was awarded management rights of the register in 2001 - has been denied access or forced to wait up to a year for approval to use theinformation and start the research. A two-year backlog in collating the data, partly blamed on underfunding, has further blown out the delays. Queensland Health has enforced the approval procedure for access to the register because of concerns the release of information could identify an individual sufferer.

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