Dennis Prager says you can’t believe all those studies saying that US health care is worse. After all they came from untrustworthy lefties.

If you believe that Americans have lousy health care, it is probably not because you have experienced inferior heath care. It is probably because you were told America has lousy health care.

Only later in the report does the discerning reader have a clue as to how agenda-driven this report and this study are. The otherwise unidentified Karen Davis, president of the never-identified Commonwealth Fund, is quoted as saying how important it was that America pass President Obama’s health care bill.

Could it be that Ms. Davis and the Commonwealth are leftwing?

They sure are, though Reuters, which is also on the Left, never lets you know.

This article highlights lots of intellectual problems

1) He thinks these studies are wrong / biased / etc. Shouldn’t one then be able to produce some alternative study that addresses whatever methodical problems you have with this one.

As Yudkowsky likes to say “The dumbest man in the world could say that the sun is shining but that doesn’t make it dark outside”

That is, it is not enough to show that your opponent is a fool, biased, evil or untrustworthy. You must actually show that he is wrong. Evil fools are sometimes right, if only by chance.

Indeed, Arnold Kling, a self-avowed libertarian, supported by CATO, the leading libertarian think tank, went out to prove exactly that. He came back saying that, no the crazy liberals were actually correct on that point.

They misunderstood the reasons, he said. The reasons were not greedy insurance companies. The reason was quite simply that much of our medical costs go towards premium medicine which is not particularly useful.

2) People who don’t agree with Dennis Prager are automatically on the Left. Karen Davis is a lefty, no doubt. But Reuters? The financial news service accused of shilling for Goldman Sachs? What do you have to do these days to get your right wing card?

It seems that agreeing with Dennis Prager is the only criteria.

3) Prager doesn’t even address the obvious retort, often ignored by those who complain of bias, that all of these journalist and researchers and think tank folks are on the left because that’s the answer they came to after studying the issues.

If it turns out that everyone who investigates something winds up supporting the other team, doesn’t that raise the possibility that the other team is right?

I am willing to take both sides to task on this. If for example, minorities consistently score lower on math tests, it could be that the test is biased. OR it could be that on average minorities are worse at math.

Similarly, if all the experts endorse “left-wing” positions, it could be that the experts are all biased. OR it could be that the left-wing position is objectively correct.

One should at least consider these possibilities.