Bruce Guenter's Thoughts

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Friday, November 10th

Gay marriage defeat?


CBC and CTV are both proudly proclaiming how voters have rejected a gay marriage ban based on the results of the amendment vote in Arizona. What they very carefully bury way down in the article is that 7 of the 8 other states with similar questions voted in favor of amending their constitutions to say that marriage consists of one man and one woman. This brings the total up to 27 states, over half of them.

How is this "fair and balanced" news reporting?
Bruce on 11.10.06 @ 10:12 PM CST [link] [No Comments]


Poverty and Health


Yesterday's newspaper ran an article entitled Rich-Poor Health Gap Shocking. In today's paper, there was a followup article about how the statistics came as a surprise to Premier Lorne Calvert. The subheading of this story proclaims that "Poverty influences health, report shows".

Bollocks!

While I have absolutely no doubt that there is a positive correlation between poverty (or people living in "poor" neighbourhoods) and sub-standard health, nothing in the original article describing the report nor this follow up displayed any kind of evidence that this is a causal relationship. In other words, poverty and poor health go together, but may both be caused by some other phenomenon.

For example, the first article says that "only 46 per cent of inner-city tots are up to date with their measles, mumps and rubella vaccinations, 95 per cent of kids in affluent areas are covered." Simply being affluent can itself not account for this dramatic difference. Getting your children vaccinated is a completely free affair. All you have to do is find the local community clinic (information that is regularly sent to parents), take your child in on the appropriate day, and receive the shots.

Also, the levels of several common sexually-transmitted diseases are more than 10 times higher than in affluent areas. How does being poor cause higher rates of STDs?

It seems that it is more likely there is a shared cause to both poverty and poor health. As such, it is unlikely that merely adding more dollars to the situation will improve things measurably. We already give the poor a large amount of money, through the many social assistance programs, and they are still poor.

When my wife was growing up, she lived among some rural communities that would be categorized in this class of people. With a few exceptions, the people there had little to no interest in educating themselves, and had a similarly lack of desire to do anything better than their parents did. In fact, she has quoted them as saying things that, were I to repeat here, would get me labelled as racist.

Without an attitude change, none of these people will ever become affluent, no matter how much money we give them. Similarly, none of them will take their health seriously. It will take a lifestyle change to make these improve, not more free money.
Bruce on 11.10.06 @ 12:11 PM CST [link] [No Comments]