Statistics: Healthcare Revisited

When Obama's healthcare reform was being sculpted, I characterized it as insurance reform. It results in more people being covered, but didn't do anything about the price side of things. It didn't do nearly enough to pull back costs.

I went looking for data about the number of doctor visits and found something terrific at National Geographic of all places. The Other Health Care Debate: Lines vs. Scatterplot has a really nice graphic that shows what I wanted to see.

In that graphic, I see that we in the U.S. don't go to the doctor often, but we still pay through the nose for healthcare. Really good statistical graphics can tell a vivid story.

Gapminder.com is absolutely fabulous. Professor Rosling is a world health specialist who has also become a statistical evangelist. He does a nice job of infusing interest and energy into his discussions. His recent video The Joy of Stats should be the opening salvo for any statistics course.

As Florence Nightingale said:

To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.