ANTI-BUSH AGENDA TAINTS FINDINGS OF WOMEN'S STUDY
Saturday, May 8, 2004
The National Women's Law Center has released its annual exercise in Bush-bashing in the guise of a state-by-state report card on women's health.
Why, precisely, is the president at fault if women in some states don't eat their veggies?
The center's study, conducted with the Oregon Health and Science University and released Thursday, is titled Making the Grade on Women's Health (available online at http://www.nwlc.org/details.cfm?id=1861§ion=health). It selects 34 "status indicators" and grades states on 27 of them for which state-level data are available.
They're grouped under four general categories. "Women's access to health-care services" includes, for example, the percentage of women who lack health insurance or live in a county with no abortion provider. "Wellness and prevention" includes screening procedures (e.g., mammograms) and behavioral measures affecting health, such as obesity, smoking and binge drinking. "Key conditions" focuses on leading causes of death, and "living in a healthy community" on overall health, including life expectancy and infant mortality, as well as economic security and education.
Sound reasonable? The individual items on the list of indicators are, though they are not independent so there is some unavoidable double-counting going on. Early prenatal care, for instance, is presumably correlated with infant mortality rates. But not perfectly -- Colorado, for example, is ranked 44th for early prenatal care, but 12th for infant mortality.
No, the problem is not the individual items; it's the methodological choices made in converting all of them to a single numerical scale.
Apart from the fact that Japanese women have the highest life expectancy in the world, is their life expectancy the proper benchmark for American women, only a tiny fraction of whom are Japanese by descent? Why is Utah the appropriate benchmark for smoking rates, apart from the fact that it currently has the lowest rates? That's not the result of federal or state policy.
And then, having concocted 27 numbers for each state, the study makes the further foolish assumption that adding them all up and dividing by 27 yields a number that means something.
How should one average the AIDS rate, 9 per 100,000 people nationally, with the rate of death from coronary heart disease, 155 per 100,000? What is their relative importance?
Why do stuff like this? Well, one may not unreasonably believe that politics does enter into it. Here's a clue: The headline on the news release is "Bush Administration Policies Hard on Mothers."
The fact that someone has an agenda, political or otherwise, does not in itself discredit his results. That's the ad hominem fallacy. However, the existence of a known agenda does help to explain otherwise inexplicable methodological choices. They want the results to come out showing that the Bush administration is not doing enough to further their agenda of more resources funneled through government at all levels.
In addition to the 27 (or 34) status indicators, the report tracks 67 state policies that might affect them. The recommendations are heavy on new insurance mandates -- length of hospital stays for mastectomies, for instance, or mental health treatment. Some of them may be desirable, but apparently the authors lack all realization of the economic trade-offs they are implicitly making. More mandatory coverage means higher premiums, which means more people are priced out of health insurance entirely. Yet one of their goals is reducing the percentage of uninsured women to zero. They can't have both these things.
The report also assumes that the authors' policy preferences ought to be the national standard. On abortion access, for instance, they urge states to spend their own funds for abortion because the 1977 Hyde Amendment prohibits using federal Medicaid funds. They say parental notification and consent requirements "often serve to limit young women's access to abortion" and can endanger their health.
They object to the ban on partial-birth abortion, which they describe as a "safe" abortion procedure. Though the ban has been enacted, "it is currently enjoined and is being challenged in multiple states."
Therefore, they say, the report "continues to examine this detrimental policy at the state level."
Just to make matters perfectly clear, what they are calling "this detrimental policy" is the ban, not the grisly procedure itself.
Of course there are people who think this way, and they have every right to express themselves in whatever manner they choose, but if they are really trying to influence public policy, it is remarkably obtuse of them to choose to write as if everybody naturally agrees with them.
We often get delegations of like-minded activists who visit the Rocky Mountain News in hope of enlisting our support for their pet causes.
They echo each other's sentiments, they beam at each other when someone gets off a good line, and they are oblivious to any skepticism on our part. And after they leave, we say to each other, "Those people spend way too much time together."
The center appears to have the same problem.