Promoted from the diaries by Jeff

Tell any pro-ObamaCare Democrat that socialized healthcare doesn’t work, and you are sure to receive the smug reply that “countries with a single-payer system have a higher life expectancy.”  Technically, that’s true.  But, as the saying goes, there are “lies, damned lies and statistics.”  The lie in this particular set of stats is indeed not in the stats themselves, but in the inference you are asked to draw from them.  You are told, for example, that Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom rate higher in life expectancy than the U.S. because of their public healthcare systems.

You’re asked to believe that all this happens in a vaccuum.  That the only — or at least largest — factor in life expectancy is the mode and quality of health insurance.  But that isn’t the case.  The Life Expectancy figure is based upon an average of death ages from any cause; and that includes non-medical causes.

But you are asked to ignore other, non-medical causes of death.  Causes like violent crime, household accidents, car accidents, etc.  These are numbers which should not be ignored in this discussion; if average age of death is seen as important to the issue of healthcare, certainly the circumstances surrounding those deaths, and whether a single-payer system would actually effect those rates, are equally important.

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You could be forgiven for thinking Barack Obama is intentionally screwing the Brits. It is hard to imagine a man who claims to be so smart doing something as dumb as sending GTMO detainees to Bermuda without Bermuda’s home government’s permission.

Because you are neither the President of the United States nor the Secretary of State of the United States, you could be forgiven for thinking that reaching out to Bermuda’s Premier would be an appropriate way to deal with the Uighurs.

The President of the United States and Secretary of State, however, should know or or have advisors who know that Bermuda is “a territory under the sovereignty of the UK, which is responsible for foreign and security policy.” In other words, the Brits are, yet again, angry with Obama for ignoring them.

The Brits are already unhappy with Obama for appearing to “undermine the tough stance adopted by the West towards Tehran” on the campaign trail, in addition to Obama’s weak stance on open trade.

But it is not just the Brits. It’s also the the people of Bermuda who do not take too kindly to Obama parking the Uighurs there. In doing so, Obama is disrupting the domestic political scene in Bermuda.

It boggles the mind to think this was negligence on the part of the American diplomatic corps. Not even Bush was able to bungle foreign diplomatic relations this badly — and this comes on the heels of Obama hacking off the French after snubbing Sarkozy publicly and privately.

The only question we must ask now is, how do you like him now?