Fitzsimon File

Adjunct science

Some interesting news from the market-fundamentalists this week. Turns out that all that effort to help people stop smoking and to protect people from deadly secondhand smoke is misguided. That's what the newest adjunct scholar let loose in Lockeville wants to believe.

Dr. John Staddon says that "probably smokers are productive for a larger fraction of their lives than nonsmokers," wants us to believe that "smokers save us all money. They may even be good for society."

Staddon says the risk from secondhand smoke is small in case you're wondering, and he cites a Dutch study to claim that smokers cost 37 percent less in medical costs over their lifetime than their "healthy cohorts."

The study compared the health care costs for three groups of people—obese nonsmokers, nonsmokers with a healthy weight, and smokers who did not struggle with obesity.

The study found that "until the age of 56, yearly health costs were highest for obese people and lowest for healthy-living people."  No surprise there, or with the finding that when people were older, the smokers had the highest costs.

Then it gets bizarre.  Here how the study's findings explained it.

"Because of differences in life expectancy (life expectancy at age 20 was 5 years less for the obese group, and 8 years less for the smoking group, compared to the healthy-living group), total lifetime health spending was greatest for the healthy-living people, lowest for the smokers, and intermediate for the obese people."

In other words, people who die sooner have lower health care costs.  There's a free market idea to save money, encourage people to smoke as much as they can. It is cheaper in the longer run and it's all about money, remember. 

Is it October 10, or April Fool's Day?

"Planely" wrong numbers

One of the most common complaints about local television news is that stations don't spend enough time reporting on state government. It's a legitimate criticism and maybe it was that lack of experience covering the state budget that explains a significant factual error in WTVD's coverage of plans by state commerce officials to buy a $9 million plane.

Governor Mike Easley ordered the officials to cancel the purchase after reporters from WTVD and other media outlets starting asking questions about it. The state had already made a $250,000 deposit on the deal, money that it looks like the state will not be able to recover.

The Thursday story on WTVD about the loss of the deposit says "the $250,000 amounts to about 1 percent of the state's budget, but in this financial crisis, every cent counts."

The state General Fund budget is $21.5 billion. That means that the lost $250,000 deposit is not one percent, but one-hundredth of one percent. Commerce officials should have cancelled the deal long before they did and every cent does count in this financial crisis, but can't we at least get the numbers right.

The news hole

It is no secret that newspapers are going through some tough times, but that doesn't make the poor decisions about headlines by copy editors any less frustrating.

As part of its ongoing effort to stop overdue plans for mass transit in North Carolina, the John Locke Foundation released a report this week claiming that the first leg of Charlotte's light rail system, the Lynx Blue Line, isn't providing enough benefits to justify its cost.

It is hardly shocking that the Lockers would claim that public transit is waste of money, but you'd think the media might put the biased and misleading research in some perspective.

But the Charlotte Observer story about the report came with the headline "Lynx line isn't paying enough to justify cost." That pretty much settles it for folks just scanning the headlines in the paper and on the Observer website. The transit line is a failure.

The headline for the online version of the story changed mid-morning Tuesday to "Lynx line isn't paying enough to justify cost, study says."  How about "Anti-government, anti-transit group says Lynx is a waste?"

The Observer story said Charlotte transit officials were still reviewing the report and didn't have a comment yet.  The Observer apparently couldn't wait until it had both sides of the story, but at least it the reporter called city officials, which is more than you can say for the folks at News 14 Carolina.

The station's story on the report simply reported the Lockers findings and quoted only the report's author. So much for balance.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.