Sex, Lies and Statistics

My absolute BEST college professor wasn’t really a professor at all. He was an independent consultant who taught a course in statistics at the local county college. I needed to take a course in statistics for my degree, and I decided to take it over the summer at the county college instead of at the university. Here I met Dr. Stanley Marash, founder of Stat-A-Matrix,who was to be my new statistics professor.



I dreaded the thought of this course – all of those formulas to memorize – but Dr. Marash made the subject come alive for me. I will always remember his lecture on ‘lying with statistics’. Hiis pet peeve was how organizations and advertisers would misuse statistics in order to make their point. If you did not understand statistics, you would be led into making the wrong interpretation of the result. He showed us many examples of how companies did this in their advertising. His mantra was ‘if they show you statistical data, look for the lie”. I never will forget this lesson, and it has served me well over the years.

Scary Statistics



Here’s a case in point: A recent report from the Journal of Hospital Medicine quoted some very scary statistics. It seems that people without health insurance are 50% MORE likely to die from a heart attack or stroke then those patients with insurance. Wow – health insurance agents must be bracing themselves for a huge surge in business. Well, hold on there – let’s not be so reactionary….snd remember Dr. Stanley Marash’s lesson.

First of all, the key word here is MORE. A little 4 letter word that most people scan right over. But as we delve deeper into the report, it seems that the heart attack/stroke mortality rate for patients with health insurance is around 2%, and the rate for people without insurance is around 3%. Technically. 3% is 50% more then 2%, so the report is not lying, per se, but many people reading the headline would skip right over that little word MORE and assume that the uninsured have a 50% mortality rate from heart attack or stroke – and this is far from the truth…but it does catch ones attention, doesn’t it?

So, even though a person without health insurance is 50% more likely to die from a heart attack or stroke, they still are not at all likely to do so. 3 chances out of a hundred are still very good odds in anyone’s book.

But there a still is a difference in mortality rates-why? Well, there are several obvious reasons. The most important one is that people without health insurance tend to put off seeking medical attention until their situation becomes dire and they have no other choice. Ask any doctor – delay in diagnosis and treatment will have a very negative effect on mortality rates. A second reason is more of a socio-economic one. People without insurance are tend to be poorer – and poorer people tend to eat a lot of fast foods and fat – and these will contribute, in turn, to cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks and strokes. In fact, when you consider these factors, it is to the credit of our health care system that there is only a 1% increase in mortality for the uninsured.

But that’s not what the powers-that-be want you to think. Their message is clear - if you don’t have health insurance, the hospital will ignore you and you’re going to die. We’ve got the statistics to prove this – that is, if you never heard of Dr. Stanley Marash. But, dear readers, now you have. Don’t you feel empowered?



Oh, sorry – there was nothing about sex in this posting. Mea culpa. I lied. But I did get you to read it all the way through, didn’t I?

***** Found this Interesting, Entertaining or Informative? Please read the complete blog at: *****
http://healthcarehullabalo.blogspot.com/

Free Blog Counter