President Pantywaist has been found out and it will get worse. The one glimmer of realism he displayed was when he recently told an audience in Montana that, with regard to health care, he was “not in favour of the British system”. Perhaps he had just seen the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics revealing that more than 30,000 people have died in England and Wales from hospital infections in just five years. Translated proportionately into American demographics, that would be 150,000 fatalities. Not the best advertisement for socialised health care.
There will be many more U-turns as reality overtakes Obama. His economic recovery plan, which cost nearly $1 trillion dollars and masked 9,000 pork barrels, has removed his halo for even quite gullible voters. This will be a one-term presidency.
Gerald Warner: “President Pantywaist in retreat” – Telegraph Blogs
Comments 28
Deaths from hospital infections totaled over 100,000 in the US in 2000, IIRC.
i remember this because the JCAHO was really busting chops about it that year.
This guy is aghast because he thinks that their rate is bad when it’s a boatload better than ours.
August 19th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Well – you might have caught him, but you might want to check your numbers, and be sure you’re not comparing apples and oranges, as happens so often with health care statistics. One fellah in the comment threads at the blog was trying to bust his chops with numbers on what turned out to be bait and switch.
August 19th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
If you’re working in hospital administration, you don’t make any mistake about Joint Commission stats.
Not more than once.
August 19th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
As you say, fuster, but you still need to determine whether the Joint Commission and Mr. Warner are really referring to the same thing – and for that matter whether Mr. Warner had his numbers right.
It would actually be very interesting if the NHS is remarkably better on hygiene than US hospitals on average. Would be nice also to have more recent statistics if we’re going to make a BFD out of it.
August 19th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
I’m beginning to think that “reality overtaking Obama” is something that will actually happen without his noticing. This is the way he thinks: “No, really, I have these magic powers of persuasion. I just have to figure out which people I have to focus my magic on.” Then, when things don’t exactly pan out, history is rewritten. You can hear him today: “The public option is just a small part- a sliver.”
August 19th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
The CDC says that we’re doing a little better now.
We’re down to 99,000 deaths annually, but I’d guess that the number of patient days has increased.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/hai.html
I know nothing about the UK stats and understand that this guy may be using poor info, so let’s just go with the Scottish verdict of ‘Not Proven”.
August 19th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
@Barbara – there was a lot of speculation at NZ Contentions as I recall – in the comments of course, where all the good stuff happened – about how Ø would react to his own political failure. The bigger question is how the country and the political class would react to the prospect of 3 or more years of a tragic lame duck and all-out partisan warfare.
August 19th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
about 7 more. Some kind of health-care bill is going to pass and it’s going to be seen as some kind of half-arsed victory for Obama.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:08 am
@fuster – half-arse victory doesn’t get him re-elected. Perception of performance on the economy and possibly on whatever crises, then strength of opposition matter most – presuming he’s not brought down by scandal. The hypothetical presumed, however, that some combination of subpar to failing grades for all intents and purposes does him in early rather than late.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:18 am
@CK MacLeod – Tsar, follow your argument and tell me where “3 or more years” of lame-duck status comes from if he passes any health-care legislation.
All in all, his foreign policy has been good, and acceptable to all but the fringes. So, you’re banking on a bad economy and that’s not certain nor going to be pinned on the donkeys for another year.
So, 3?
August 20th, 2009 at 12:34 am
“Any health care legislation” covers too large a set of possibilities to be meaningful. Can’t really agree at all with “his foreign policy has been good.” It qualifies as “acceptable” only because nothing, yet, has blown up. I’d call it a marginal negativeon the basis of consistently terrible atmospherics – “reset,” “apology,” “kow-tow,” and so on. “Bad economy” is also too vague, and, even if I were to accept that the public won’t blame the economy on the Ds for another year – a dubious proposition – super-huge debt in exchange for a sluggish “wageless and jobless” pseudo-recovery may not look like much of a deal. Likewise for piddling progress on “health insurance reform’ in the process of running up an even bigger bill while scaring more than half the country more than half to death.
Look, if he gets his act together, he gets his act together. The hypothesis is that what we’ve been seeing the last few months IS Barack Obama and the Obama “machine,” which doesn’t bode well for future and escalating problems, and that in the meantime he’s squandered probably the most important 6 months of his presidency, with the only truly significant legislation he’s passed being highly unpopular (72% want the rest of the stimulus money canceled).
Polls generally show BO having fallen far, fast. Even Gallup, polling adults, has him barely above 50 approval. Rasmussen has Republicans 5 points above Dems on the generic ballot, and prefered to Dems on 8 out of 10 most important issues. His party could get hit very hard in 2010, and he may not have it in him to pull a Bill Clinton – partly because that’s not who he appears to be, partly because this isn’t the go-go ’90s.
6 months ago, it was easier to imagine him walking to second term. Now it looks like sometime between now and November 2012, presuming he runs again, he’s going to have to figure out how to recapture the indies who’ve abandoned him and the young’uns who are disillusioned him. It’s not like 2008 was a wipeout.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:59 am
I’m impressed with your comment and without the time to answer tonight.
Let me say one thing. What you think of as “terrible atmospherics” is only thought of that way by a small percentage of people.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:11 am
Terrible to a few, negative to a larger number, nothing for anyone else to feel terribly proud about: Marginal negative. I think I’m being generous, while assuming a great deal of obliviousness on the part of the general public, and while refraining from making any predictions about Iran, Afghanistan, or anything else.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:25 am
Just waking up when I read this (#1):
I had to rub my eyes twice. Once to wake up, next to stifle my amazement. The excerpt in the post plainly says:
The population of the US is five times that of Britain (300 vs 60 million). But our number of hospital-induced infections is only, roughly, three times theirs. The only way to understand the erroneous conclusion fuster has drawn is if he interpreted the 150,000 figure as a hypothetical about Britain, not the US. Quite apart from the fact that that would be a bizarre use of the phrase “translated proportionately into America demographics,” I happen to know that the US figure for last year is approx. 100,000, because it appeared in a news item less than a week ago. Plus, 150,000 = 5 x 30,000, so the figures cited would make sense if morbidity here is no better than there.
All in, that means the British rate is 50% higher than it should be were our rate the norm. Inversely, if the British rate is taken as the norm, then ours is 25% lower than it should be.
Hint to fuster: Don’t think in “boatloads.”
PS: What does IIRC stand for?
August 20th, 2009 at 7:01 am
@Joe NS – Joe Netiquette from the beach. IIRC If I Recall Correctly
August 20th, 2009 at 8:18 am
From #14:
That should read: “. . . if the British rate is taken as the norm, then ours is 33% lower than it should be”!
My apologies.
nokarmahere, thanks for the update. In studying the acronym, I initially tossed around the idea that it might stand for the “International Institute of Radical Confusion.”
August 20th, 2009 at 8:35 am
My Democrat friends seem a little embarrassed, a little sheepish these days, especially the Jewish ones.
This may or may not be a good sign.
Republicans better be able to effectively respond to a President and a party which will stop at nothing to steal the next elections.
SEIU thugs at town halls is tip of the iceberg (if, of course, they havn’t all melted by then.)
August 20th, 2009 at 8:53 am
I don’t think our Supreme Court should take into account foreign precedents in its analysis; and I don’t think we should make too much of the commentary of damn furriners in our evaluation of our president.
Plus, I don’t see the applicability of the “pantywaist” descriptor. The man is many things; but he’s not timid.
August 20th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Further (very embarrassing) correction. In rereading the initial post, I see that I overlooked the important words “in just five years.” If the 30,000 figure is correct, then so is fuster, and I’m wrong. Apologies again.
August 20th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Regarding TGL’s “foreign policy” apologies, I was glad to see no apologies to Japan on August 6. Let’s see if that continues in November when he visits.
August 20th, 2009 at 10:04 am
I was puzzled by the (annualized) 16-fold higher rate of morbidity from hospital-related (nosocomial) infectious diseases in the US vs the UK. Something seemed very wrong. So I did a little research, and here is what I learned:
1) The 100,000 figure for nosocomial-derived infectious deaths in the US is compiled by adding up the deaths from all pathogens, of which there are some seven or eight.
2) Warrens’ UK figure of 30,000 deaths over five years totals the deaths from just two infectious agents (staph variants) acquired in hospital. Moreover, the emphasis in the study was as much on the fact that the rate of infection from staph had doubled in the five-year period as it was on the raw figure.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/hsq/HSQ21MRSA.pdf
3) The only other pathogen for which I could find a UK figure was strep, which contributed roughly 4000 additional deaths over approximately the same five-year period.
4) An earlier study (1996), comparing all nosocomial infectious-death rates in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand shows no 16-fold disparities among any of the countries for any pathogen. Sometimes the US rate is better than the others, sometimes not.
http://www.health.vic.gov.au/ideas/infcon/infcon/bg
5) The same study contains a particularly pertinent obsevation:
In sum, the additional data – what I could find – persuade me that fuster’s “boatloads more” remark is way out of line (see particularly, Item 4 supra).
August 20th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Thanks, Joe, for looking into the UK vs US death numbers comparison. It looks to be apples vs oranges to some exponential power. What remains puzzling for now is why Warner felt the statistic was meaningful enough to stand on its own and prove a point. I wonder if the initial reporting on the number included the kind of direct comparison that so far has eluded us.
As for the CotD vs aCotD vs aaCotD… I was kind of kidding around, kind of making up for having made a possibly weak choice. Don’t intend to make it a habit. Better practice would have been simply to have written up a quick post on Panetta the incompetent moron, but not as a CotD, much less an a or aa CotD.
August 20th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Colin, what I was struck by in reading a Telegraph news article was the emphasis on the doubling of the rate of staph-infection-related deaths. In other words, what was thought newsworthy was that hospital care in the UK was, possibly, rapidly deteriorating. I agree that why Warner (NB: not Warren) focused on what he did is a little puzzling. There was no comparison, that I could see, made between the UK and the US in either the study itself or the news story.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Taunting Obie as a pantywaist just might be effective as long as we remember this guy is an acolyte of the Saul Alinsky School of Sharp Elbows and In Your Face Politics.
And, while he busies himself trying to show the world how to successfully do a wealth redistrubution and how to build a thriving welfare state, he can also point to the lethal drones still killing our sworn enemies in and around Afghanistan, and the dead Somali pirates thanks to Navy Seals.
We will need more than ridicule to turn back the left wing tide. Nat Hentoff, John Simon, Marc Steyn and other emerging cultural icons are a hopeful sign.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
make that ROGER Simon please!
August 20th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Make that ROGER L. Simon, please!
ss, Roger Simon, sans L, is a fairly liberal contributor to Politico. Roger Simon, avec L, is the PajamasMedia blogger.
I’ve read John Simon for years at The New Criterion. He’s a music and theatre critic, for the most part, and rarely touches on politics. He’s also a superb reviewer of books. From the stray remark or innuendo here and there in his writings, if I had to bet, I’d say he’s on the conservative side of most issues.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Cartoons will also help. Someone here just introduced me to Chris Muir. I think Repugs need to loose the old fogey image as much as possible. It’s gotta be hip to be a conservative, so Roger L and a hip old dude like Hentoff can really help to convince people in the great muddle to give us yet another look.
August 20th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Scientific socialist, I don’t know about the image of R’s but I guaranteeee that the image of the Left will need a major overall in the near future, the first being dump the top rats in the party!
August 21st, 2009 at 12:31 pm
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