I came across this headline at the Times’s Ideas Blog: “British Teeth Among the Healthiest in Europe”, and assumed it had to be a joke.
As most of us know, poking fun at British dental hygiene is a comedic staple worthy of immortalization by the Simpson’s (see Big Book of British Smiles) and others.
Apparently it’s not true. The source here is an Economist article with a zippy little chart that shows how many nations other than Britain commit crimes against good teeth. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, apparently, are tops for the rate of “decayed, missing or filled” teeth among twelve-year-olds. The U.S. comes in ninth. England is eighteenth.
And they say socialized medicine was no good.
I spent 13 years working in advertising, and I know a thing or two about manipulating data to make it look more compelling at the client’s request. BS like this is one shining example.
First off, the report is compiled by the OECD: the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. OECD is a globalist pro-UN organization with an overt anti-USA bias.
Second, look at the report: Decayed, Missing, or FILLED teeth in 12-year-olds. A kid with one filling in the US is, for the sake of this sham “study” is considered equal to a kid in England who is MISSING a tooth because their socialized healthcare system didn’t repair the tooth in time to save it. Let’s remove the “filled” part of the data and see where the USA ranks versus Britain then.
As usual, you NYT “journalists” regurgitate some propaganda and leave it for the rest of us to do the actual five minutes of journalism work of looking up things like “OECD” to see who did the study and what, if any, bias existed in the study. Sorry, but I won’t weep when your companies go out of business, or drop your false pretenses and officially become the Pravda of the Obama administration thanks to another bailout at taxpayer expense.