It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. --- Mark Twain
One of the most often cited reasons in support of socialized healthcare is the fact that the United States spends more per person on medical care than any other nation, yet our life expectancies are lower.
That statement is actually true. However, as Robert Ohsfeldt pointed out in his book The Business of Health, the reason it is true is because Americans have a very disproportionate tendency to kill themselves. If you exclude homicides and auto accidents from the data, US life expectancy is #1 in the world. While our health care system is doing a poor job of preventing shootouts and drunk driving, it is doing a good job of healing the sick.
One of the exercises we had in my first economics class was to write a paper using statistics to "prove" something that was demonstrably false. It tuned out to be an easy assignment (I think I proved that church attendance caused crime rates to increase). In this case, it turns out (not all that surprisingly) that there are many things that affect mortality besides health care. Always look behind the statistics.
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