Partisanship, Sicko and Oman, in that order.

Everything's partisan (or at least ideological) - even movie reviews. I find it kind of sad that Micheal Moore's Sicko has attracted a single bad review, and said review comes from... the New York Post.

Oh, and at the other side of the scatterplot, the very best review for Sicko comes from the San Fransisco Chronicle. The New Yorker reviewer is the only one to weaken the correlation a bit (unless you count the Washington Post as liberal).

Also: for those who love lovely simple descriptive stats, via Brian Beutler, here are the World Heath Organization international rankings. Here's a Salon piece on the controversy surrounding those rankings. If you're wondering, like I was, about how Oman - which spent $334 on health care per capita at the time of the study - finished 8th overall, it seems to be because of their rather amazing improvement since 1970 (life expectancy at birth has increased by 25 years since then) and efficient use of resources. This might be because Oman's rich leave the country for specialized treatment or major interventions, allowing the remaining $334 to stretch further across the less fortunate population.

Only 446?

Via TAPPED, the Bush Admin has reversed its awful decision to end the Survey of Income and Program Participation - one of the most important U.S. panel data set for assessing government programs - and replace it with a new, cheaper survey.

As usual with the Bushies, the reversal is pretty disingenuous:

Bush's FY08 budget called for the elimination of the SIPP. Now that it has decided to continue the program, it is unclear how it will be funded. Unless the Bush administration modifies its budget request, Congress may not be able to allocate funds for the SIPP because President Bush has vowed to veto any appropriations above his budget requests.

..."The Census Bureau has recently indicated that, without additional funding, it will start a new SIPP panel with only half of the standard number of respondents. This is unacceptable. Interviewing only half as many people would severely limit researchers’ ability to examine particular government programs, sub-populations and state-level data. Many government programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or child care subsidies, affect only small shares of the U.S. population, so a smaller sample would not provide enough data to properly assess these programs. It would also make it difficult, if not impossible, to assess demographic trends at the state level (such as wealth, childcare usage, etc.), even for larger states like North Carolina or Washington."


No good statistics on poor people or program effeciveness - just the way the GOP likes it!

But my real question is: why did only 446 social scientists sign the letter? Why not thousands?!?