Well, *THAT’s* encouraging!

Iowahawk:

A Briton is 5 times more likely to die from government health care than an American is to die from a gunshot.

Assuring in this time of Obamacare.

(Via Ace’s sidebar)

For any who care, my check on his statistics is below the break.


It appears that David is speaking ‘‘conservatively’’ here.  ( DYSWIDT?)  For National Health Service death data, he links this press release (‘‘Basic errors killing 1000 NHS patients a month a study has revealed)’’:

...Researchers from The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine based the study on 1,000 deaths at 10 NHS trusts during 2009.  The study revealed that basic errors were made in more than one in 10 cases, leading to 5.2% of deaths, which was the equivalent of nearly 12,000 preventable deaths in hospitals in England every year.

Spreading that 12,000 over the U.K.’s estimated population of 61 million in 2009, I get a death rate for medical errors of 19.67 deaths per 100,000.

U.S. gun statistics for the study period (found here) are:

So... 19.67/3.35 = 5.87 (i.e., ‘‘almost 6’’)

Even adding in gun suicides (5.75/100k in 2005), the U.S. rate is still only 9.10/100k. Which leaves the average U.K. citizen twice as likely to be killed by a doctor as an American to be killed by a gun... even if the American kills himself.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 18:40:54 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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