In its infinite wisdom, Congress passed a requirement that would deny healthcare to millions:
“[T]he new federal requirement compels anyone seeking Medicaid coverage to provide a birth certificate, a passport, or another form of identification in order to sign up for benefits or renew them.”
As pointed out by SusanG on Daily Kos, this will mean millions of possibly sick and untreated people in our communities. In addition to being immoral, this provision is potentially suicidal for all of us. Bigotry and hatred kills.
April 11th, 2006
MediaLens does not buy the latest evasions by Iraq Body Count [Iraq Body Count - A Shame Becoming Shameful: John Pilger And A Leading Epidemiologist Challenge IBC]. They destroy IBC’s claim that their data are usually cited by the press and public officials in the context of articles commenting on the tragedy of civilian casualties in Iraq. MediaLens points, rather, to a number of instances where the IBC figures are touted as countering more damning claims of Iraqi civilians looses due to the invasion and occupation.
MediaLens continues their critique by suggesting a methods that IBC could use to test the accuracy of their tally, a method that was suggested to IBC quite some time ago. In particular, they quote an anonymous epidemiologist thusly:
“IBC is run by amateurs. It is easy to calculate the sensitivity of their surveillance system. They would take another list or independent sample, and see the fraction of that sample that appeared in their data base. I have asked them to do this over a year ago, they have not.
“There are other databases out there (NCCI being the most complete), they could do a capture-recapture analysis (as lots of experts have been calling for) and see how many people have died but they have not.
“Attached is a graph [not included here] of deaths in Guatemala from 1960 to 1995 put together by Patrick Ball at UC Berkeley. Murders are with the black line, the % reported in the press with the dashed line. Note, when violence goes up, reporting in the press goes down. I have calibrated surveillance systems during times of war (always in Africa admittedly) and would be astonished if their system could capture 50% of deaths.
“In Saddam’s time, morgues + hospital reports + death certificates reported to the central Gov. only accounted for about 1/3 of the deaths that must have been occurring in Iraq. There have now been 15,000 excess violent deaths just in the Baghdad Morgues! If Baghdad is about 1/5th of the country, and the morgues do not capture all deaths, what does this imply… the UNDP number (more than twice IBC at the time it was done) is known by the authors to be an underestimate and was based on a couple of questions out of a long (88 min.?) interview.” (Email to Media Lens, March 23, 2006)
There is no shame in being an amateur. And the IBC amateurs deserve immense credit for attempting to count the Iraqi dead from the beginning, when the professionals were not engaged. But when other estimates started to appear, it behooved IBC to pay attention to critiques from the professionals and to try and estimate the accuracy of their estimates. This they have failed to do.
It should be noted that, if the claim in the last paragraph from the epidemiologist that in Saddam’s Iraq only about 1/3 of deaths were reported via official mechanisms is true, this fact is important as it strongly suggests that, in the present chaos, the comparable figures are likely to be even lower. Thus, estimates based on official figures, even when not manipulated for political reasons to underestimate deaths, are likely to be low by a factor of three or more.
Does all this matter? To many it will seem a tempest in a teapot. Of course, for many of us even one excess death in pursuit of an illegal war is too many. However, if one believes wars like this one are not immoral, one would expect a certain number of deaths. The question becomes how many. In evaluating that argument, 30,000 or many more than 100,000 dead [extrapolating from the Lancet figure of 100,000 derived in September, 2004] makes an enormous difference. When hundreds of thousands of civilians die, all pretense of humanitarian wars to liberate an oppressed population falls away. So the true number of the dead and dying matters. We should do the best we can to estimate it accurately.
April 11th, 2006
There is a debate among Bush-watchers as to whether the President has any serious knowledge about foreign [or any] affairs. This question has now been definitively answered in the negative. [Leaker in Chief can't answer the question] At one of his recent unscripted forums he was asked an unanticipated question about what laws govern military contractors in Iraq. His response was “Help!” and later “don’t mean to be dodging the question, although it’s kind of convenient in this case.” He obviously knew nothing whatsoever about this issue that has been the subject of numerous press reports over the three years his government has been occupying Iraq with the assistance of tens of thousands of these mercenaries who are subject to no laws, American or Iraqi, as they shoot anyone they choose.
A Must Watch for its insight into our leader.
April 11th, 2006