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How can the president of a major nation and society, the one with the most successful economic system in world history, stand and talk about business when he's never worked for one? Or about jobs when he has never really had one? And when it's the same for 92% of his senior staff and closest advisers? They've spent most of their time in academia, government and/or non-profit jobs or as "community organizers."
They should have been in an employment line.


Film at 11....

Obama is as slick a bullsh*tter as ever came down the Pike, and when you combine the knee-jerk monolithic Democratic votes of the minorities with the ill-informed white guilt/ clueless liberal vote, it's no wonder Obama was elected the first time despite having virtually no experience in government and absolutely no experience in business.

The really frightening question is, how did a slick-talking bullsh*tter with no real world experience get elected a second time?

Bonus question: why isn't the lamestream media eviscerating this administration?

The OP's statistics eloquently demonstrates an indisputable fact;

Half of all Americans have a below average IQ.

Is that the 47% that Romney was talking about?

#1
Percentage of men and women who survived a cancer five years after diagnosis:
U.S. 65%
England 46%
Canada 42%

We begin our journey into the world of unverified cancer statistics with the claim that the US has higher cancer survival rates 5 years after diagnosis which is a wonderful set of numbers. However, there are no sources (providing evidence for ones claims is quite annoying, right?) and what these numbers fail to consider are important issues such as the percentage of the population who receive an accurate received diagnosis, whether 5 years after diagnosis the patient was living cancer free or still subject to chemo-therapy treatment or the total number of incidents. Wouldn’t a reasonable person much rather live in England or Canada if the incidence incidences of cancer in these countries were one tenth of what they are in the USA?
But, as promised, let’s get some hard verified numbers in here. First, some statistics from the United Kingdom, aka England. Source: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/can0410.pdf (notice the “.GOV” in the URL, that **** is official!!!)

Counting 109,747 incidents per year and tracking them for 5 years their average survival rate came out to be around 58% (63,585 patients still alive after 5 years). Notice how that rate is a full 12% higher than the rate quoted by the author of the prior email? That’s so far beyond any measurement error as to defy credulity.

But maybe they made the same mistake with 5 year survival rates for US cancer patients. Let’s have a look!
For US statistics the best source of five year survival rates is the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (holy mother of God, long words!) or SEER program which is run by the National Cancer Institute. They were nice enough to come up with a similar set of statistics already calculated for us. According to them (source: http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html#survival) “the overall 5-year relative survival for 1999-2006 from 17 SEER geographic areas was 66.0%. Five-year relative survival by race and sex was: 66.8% for white men; 67.0% for white women; 60.6% for black men; 54.9% for black women”. It needs to be noted here that the 17 SEER geographic areas only cover about 40% of the US population, but we’ll just let that stand since Joe, the author of the email, understated the SEER rate by a full percent.

Finally, let’s look at Canada which Joe makes out to be a pretty damn miserable place for people hoping to survive their cancer diagnosis for more than five years. Only 4 in 10 people will live five years after they’ve been diagnosed with cancer according to Joe and the imaginary International Health Organization of the UN. The Canadian Cancer Society would beg to differ. According to them (source: http://www.cancer.ca/Canada-wide/Abo...spx?sc_lang=en) “62% of people are expected to survive for 5 years after their cancer diagnosis”.

So let’s compare our unverified sources to the verified sources:

Country 5 year survival (without sources) 5 year survival (with sources provided)
United States of America 65% 66%
United Kingdom 46% 58%
Canada 42% 62%

On average, our un-sourced claims were off by only about 11% from official statistics. Clearly that’s an acceptable margin of error for people who try to form a political opinion. Joseph Goebbels would approve.

Lastly, before moving on to the next point let’s take a look at this “5 year survival” rate and examine what it really tells us and what it’s limitations are. Generally, 5 year survival statistics are more useful as a tool to determine the standard of care for aggressive diseases that have a shorter life expectancy following diagnosis (lung cancer for example) than diseases with a longer life expectancy following diagnosis (colon cancer).

So, the above statistics, in order to paint a fair picture, really should be broken down into sub-types of cancer since if lung cancer rates in the UK for some reason are disproportionately higher than in Canada and the USA that might well account for the difference in 5 year survival rates.

#2
Percentage of patients diagnosed with diabetes who received treatment within six months:
U.S. 93%
England 15%
Canada 43%

Now, let’s move onto the next claim. The numbers above would like the reader to believe that it is far better to be a diabetes patient in the USA than in Canada or England. Sadly, it is impossible to verify the claims regarding the percentages of patients receiving treatment within 6 months as these statistics are nowhere to be found.

However, accepting these numbers at face value, the question the reader should ask is why we ought to care if the patient receives treatment within such a timeframe. Diabetes is not an aggressive disease like malaria so we are left to wonder why a six month treatment window is of such relevance.

Looking for some authorities on the subject, the Diabetes Quality Improvement Project of the International Diabetes Federation, when discussing factors on the quality of care for diabetics, does not reference any such time frames being of vital importance. In fact, they suggest measuring standards of care for diabetics as follows:

- Process of Care;
o Annual HbA1c testing
o Annual LDL cholesterol testing
o Annual screening for nephropathy
o Annual eye examination
- Proximal outcomes:
o HbA1c control
o LDL cholesterol control
- Distal outcomes:
o Lower-extremity amputation rates
o Kidney disease in persons with diabetes
o Cardiovascular mortality in people with diabetes.

(Source: http://www.diabetesatlas.org/content...l-quality-care)

Notice how in that list there is not one mention to treatment being received within 6 months. So how vital of a statistic can a six month treatment time-frame really be if the IDF doesn’t consider it worth including in their list of Healthcare quality indicators for diabetes?

Further, the reader is also left to wonder what time-frame the diabetics in the UK and Canada will receive their treatments in? Is it 9 months or 2 years? If the former were the case then that would hardly be something worth a raised eyebrow over. If the latter were the case that could be disastrous. Lastly, we are also not told what the rate of diagnosis is. Are only 10% of diabetics diagnosed in a timely manner in the USA compared to Canada and England? Then these statistics make the USA look much better than it actually is while if the rate of diagnosis is equivalent a different picture emerges.

So rather than oracle about further, let’s compare a statistic for which verifiable data is available to measure the quality of care for diabetics in these countries. Let’s look at mortality rates by country for diabetics. Because what better measure to determine quality of care than to see if the care can keep patients from dying!

First, let’s get some hard numbers how many people die each year from diabetes in the countries we’re looking at. In Canada that’s around 31,765 based on 2006 estimates, in the US 71,382 based on 2007 estimates and in the UK the number is around 5,583 based on 2008 estimates (Sources: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm, http://www.nchod.nhs.uk/NCHOD%5Ccompendium.nsf/($All)/01AB83F6E3EFA976802576D000355B78/$File/27C_061NO_08_V1_D.xls?OpenElement, http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ccdpc-cpc..._DM_RR_Age.csv).

Next, let’s get an idea of how many diabetics there are in each of these countries. Based on 2000 data and 2030 projections we can get the following numbers:

- USA: 20,644,333
- UK: 2,005,800
- Canada: 2,313,400

(Source: http://www.who.int/diabetes/facts/wo.../en/index.html extrapolated based on 2000-2030 projections)

These numbers together with the countries respective populations give us:
- a mortality rate of 1.37% for diabetics in Canada and a diabetes rate of 5.87% among Canadians;
- a mortality rate of 0.28% for diabetics in the UK and a diabetes rate of 2.84% among the Brits, Scotts and Welsh;
- a mortality rate of 0.35% for diabetics in the USA and a diabetes rate of 5.71% among Americans.

This provides quite a strong contrast to the numbers above which would have us believe that being a diabetic in the UK is tantamount to a death sentence on account of treatment not being available in a timely manner.
As a kicker, let’s also take a look at amputation rates among diabetics for these three countries, because short of dying that sounds like the next best thing to want to prevent as a diabetic. For this issue we find:

- Canada 0.51% amputation rate per year for diabetics.
- USA 0.41% amputation rate per year for diabetics.
- United Kingdom 0.26% amputation rate per year for diabetics.

(Sources: http://www.dagc.org/diastatsus.asp, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8427937.stm , http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/j...16430/abstract)

So let’s recapitulate. The UK is about as good as the US as preventing diabetics from dying and better than the US at preventing diabetics from having their limbs chopped off in spite of the egregious delay in getting diabetics their treatment. Canada still sucks, but not as badly as we would’ve otherwise been led to believe.

#3
Percentage of seniors needing hip replacement who received it within six months:
U.S. 90%
England 15%
Canada 43%

Again the six month figure comes up. What’s the deal with this number? Can we list some relevant statistics instead? How about the good old costs associated with hip replacements maybe? If I had to have a hip replacement it would matter a lot more to me if the surgery will see me in debt for the rest of my life or not. In the US cost is around $41,597 for the procedure. By contrast in the UK it’s done for $11,127 - $14,307 and in Canada for as little as $11,600. (Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_replacement, http://www.privatehealth.co.uk/hospi...p-replacement/, http://answers.google.com/answers/th...id/775660.html)

How we are supposed to verify that patients receive an elective surgery within 6 months of needing it I am not sure. My uncle needs a hip replacement badly for 10 years now but he hasn’t elected to go in for the procedure so is he counted and dragging down the average?

Next, let’s take a look at the number of actual replacement surgeries these countries engage in on a year to year basis. Looking at this data we get:

- Canada: 23,000 surgeries per year or one for every 1,487 people per year.
- UK: 43,500 surgeries per year or one for every 1,426 people per year.
- USA: 120,000 surgeries per year or one for every 2,583 people per year.

Sources: (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/320591.stm, http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/h/hip_...ment/stats.htm, http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2010/...lacements.html)

What the above implies is that per capita the US rate of hip replacement surgeries is actually much lower, possibly due to the fact that many people who need it simply can’t afford it on account of the cost being 3-4 times what they are in Canada or the UK. Now if we assume that the rate of osteoarthritis per capita is equivalent for these three countries then we’d be left to conclude that hip replacement surgery is actually less readily available to patients who need it in the USA than in Canada or the UK. So let’s look for the data:
- USA: “An estimated 27 million adults had osteoarthritis in 2005.” (Source: http://www.cdc.gov/arthritis/data_st...ated_stats.htm)
- UK: It is estimated that osteoarthritis causes joint pain in 8.5 million people in the UK. (Source: http://www.cks.nhs.uk/osteoarthritis...ion/prevalence)
- Canada: It (osteoarthritis)affects 10% of Canada’s population.(Source: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-619-...053549-eng.htm) – 3,419,800 extrapolated patient population

So using these numbers we can now determine the number of hip replacement surgeries per osteoarthritis patient. Of course it needs to be noted at this point that osteoarthritis can also necessitate knee joint replacement surgery, but for the purpose of this review we will focus only on hip replacement.

- USA: 120,000 / 27,000,000 = 0.44 surgeries / patient per year
- UK: 43,500 / 8,500,000 = 0.51 surgeries / patient per year
- Canada: 23,000 / 0.67 surgeries / patient per year

This suggests that patients in Canada and the UK are actually more likely to get a hip replacement in a given year that patients in the US, which is quite contradictory to the suggestion that 90% of US hip replacement requiring patients receive one within 6 months.

#4
Percentage referred to a medical specialist who see one within one month:
U.S. 77%
England 40%
Canada 43%

Like pretty much every other statistic in this list of statistics the above numbers are impossible to verify as the unbiased reader likely suspects already. Where is this data being tracked? Is there a national registry of queue times to see a specialist in these countries? No. Was there a survey done to see how long it takes people to get seen? No. In other words, these numbers seem made up. By contrast, the below numbers are not made up and reference some hard verifiable data – the number of physicians per capita (source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/he...r-1-000-people referencing the World Bank’s World Development indicator database):

- United States: 2.3 physicians per 1,000 people.
- United Kingdom: 2.2 per 1,000 people.
- Canada: 2.1 per 1,000 people.

Please note that there is only a marginal difference in the per capita number of physicians comparing these three countries (Germany & France, two other bastions of “socialized medicine” by contrast have around 3.4 physicians per 1,000 people). So, we should ask: “How it is that the number of physicians per 1,000 people is almost equivalent amongst these three countries and yet supposedly specialists are “harder” to come by in Canada and England?”

Also, do we as patients really care if we see a specialist right away if our regular physician can see us at once? Let’s assume for a moment that in the U.S. we have a hypothetical 2 month waiting list to see a physician but only 3 week waiting list to see a specialist while in the UK and Canada a physician can be seen in 2 weeks and a specialist in 6 weeks. Then the US patient would be in front of a specialist after 11 weeks and the British / Canadian patient would be in front a specialist after 8 weeks.

The bottom line – don’t let misleading statistics fool you!

#5
Number of MRI scanners (a prime diagnostic tool) per million people:
U.S. 71
England 14
Canada 18

MRI scanners are great. But the data given above is just flat out wrong. Based on OECD data (Source:http://www.irdes.fr/EcoSante/DownLoa...uestedData.xls) the number of machines per million people actually breaks down as follows:
- USA: 25.9
- UK: 5.6
- Canada: 6.7

The above numbers are based on 2007 data but it is unlikely that in the last 3 years either the UK or Canada purchased enough machines to bridge the gap. What is really sad about this particular issue is that whoever falsified these statistics in this email could not even be bothered to get accurate statistics to support his claims regarding the notion of supremacy of the US medical system.

#6
Percentage of seniors (65+), with low income, who say they are in "excellent health":
U.S. 12%
England 2%
Canada 6%

Where is this survey? What’s the sample size that was used? And could it be that the discrepancy exists maybe because seniors in the UK and Canada have more regular check-ups or access to a better diagnostic medicine infrastructure alerting them to problems sooner? I’m not sure what exactly this is supposed to tell us. Using self-identification in lieu of actual hard facts seems like a bad idea to determine quality of a nation’s health care system.
So in keeping with the pattern of this rebuttal let’s get some actual facts in here about the health of seniors for these three countries. Life expectancy for people 65+ seems like a great way to measure that and the good old OECD was kind enough to provide this data for the three referenced countries.

- USA: Males; 17.1 years / Females: 19.8 years
- UK: Males; 17.6 years / Females: 20.2 years
- Canada: Males; 18.1 years / Females: 21.3 years

In other words, while seniors in the USA may self-identify as in “excellent health” the actual OECD data (Source:http://www.irdes.fr/EcoSante/DownLoa...uestedData.xls) suggests that citizens 65+ in the UK and Canada are in fact in better health as measured by their life expectancy

This is also false:
http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2011/jan/20/steve-southerland/92-percent-obama-administration-has-no-private-sec/

Dammit drafter, why do you always fall for this bs? It makes you look dumb, and even funnier, it makes everyone who jumps around using your false "data" as "proof" as to why the administration is horrible look like idiots.

You single-handedly are making people on this board look dumber. I don't know whether to congratulate you or shake my head in wonderment. Sometimes I think you're actually a liberal plant, trying to see just what stupidity people on the far right will believe.

Ok, so your point is?
Drafter is not retarded. Rambo and I have had discussions about this. He's a PI with a heart of gold who sleeps with his dog Scruffy in a van down by the river.

Drudged (hahahah- get it?) & skimmed through the dry link & it turns out Obama really had "over 20%"(possibly 24%) including lawyers and lobbyists vs 38% for George Jr.
Thank you for tricking me into these "facts". (yawn)

so who's gonna verify Victor's so called facts..??

just the facts ma'am...

Either way, I've never received an email from my single friend saying "forward this on! Important information about...."

People get stuck in a filter bubble based on their friends and their interests. The one-sided content validates and entrenches their opinions and values. Part of the filter is the source of the content, as distribution methods can vary by groups. A lot of conservatives may get their information from forwarded email and radio talk shows, while liberals receive DailyKos action newsletters and watch mainstream media. Occasionally you find yourself conversing with someone from a different bubble (thanks to a shared interest like cigars), and you cannot fathom why someone would have differing opinions. You feel like they'd be idiots to ignore the massive amount of "evidence" that has been provided to you, not realizing that you've only been provided a portion of the information available, which is a different portion than what they've been provided.

What's wrong with you, Joker? This is the Cbid Political Forum. How dare you post something that actually makes sense.

People get stuck in a filter bubble based on their friends and their interests. The one-sided content validates and entrenches their opinions and values. Part of the filter is the source of the content, as distribution methods can vary by groups. A lot of conservatives may get their information from forwarded emails and radio talk shows, while liberals receive DailyKos action newsletters and watch mainstream media. Occasionally you find yourself conversing with someone from a different bubble (thanks to a shared interest like cigars), and you cannot fathom why someone would have differing opinions. You feel like they'd be idiots to ignore the massive amount of "evidence" that has been provided to you, not realizing that you've only been provided a portion of the information available, which is a different portion than what they've been provided.

Edit: I just wanted to add that this wasn't necessarily directed at victor- just musings brought on by that comment.

Our children (not you Victor)

We globalists control everything.

Yes, and some day it'll all be worthless. BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHA (cough cough) HAHAHAHA
You'll be the one-eyed, gimp kings of the land of the sightless gimps.