health care mailbag #2

First of all, thanks to those who have commented. It's always good to have an open, civil dialogue about issues like these even if we disagree. Now, here's something that jumped out at me from the comments section:

one poll showed that 47% of doctors will retire if this bill goes into affect.

I think I found the poll in question and since I am such a stats nerd, I had to analyze it. The poll was conducted and published by a newspaper called Investor’s Business Daily (IBD). Their report on it can be found here.

Of their polling method, IBD writes:

Our questionnaire went out Aug. 28 to some 25,600 doctors nationwide. Of that substantial sample, we got 1,476 responses. One hundred of those were retired, leaving 1,376.

This makes their response rate 5.8% (1,476/25,600), which is an unacceptably low rate. For perspective, a good rate for a mail survey (I’m assuming theirs was a mail survey but they don’t specifically say) is around 70%. Trying to make assumptions about a population with only a 6% response rate is impossible and so this poll ends up meaning absolutely nothing. This doesn’t even bring up other possible things wrong that they didn’t discuss, such as how they acquired the list of 25,600 doctors to begin with, how they worded the questions (since they didn’t provide a sample questionnaire), etc.

Getting some background about this newspaper might help explain why so many doctors did not participate and why those that did respond might not accurately represent the population of doctors in the United States. IBD made the news back in July 2009 when they printed this statement about health care and Stephen Hawking in an editorial:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Except that Stephen Hawking has always lived in the UK and receives treatment from their National Health Service. Hawking later made a statement defending the NHS saying that he is alive still because of them. This mistake at least gives the impression that IBD is more interested in disparaging health care reform than they are in the facts. Since this incident predates the attempted poll in question, it is likely that many doctors disregarded this request when it was received it in the mail (explaining the very low response rates). Those that would respond would likely be those more sympathetic to the views of the newspaper, creating an extremely large percentage of them to respond in similar ways.