Posts you wish you had written

Have you ever written something useful in a comment to a blog post, and later regretted not having expanded it into a full post?  Especially when someone writes it up into a much better story than you ever could? It's just happened to me.

Some time ago, the legendary Neil Harding wrote a post about how marvellous the NHS was and how the UN had ranked the UK 26th in the world and the US 37th. I pointed out to him that this was a complete nonsense because the UN biased the metric towards tax funded systems. As I explained in a later post, I refrained from writing a full post on it because fisking Neil seems somehow unsporting - to the dextrosphere he occupies a position somewhat akin to that of Ming Campbell to the Conservatives. He's their man, but he's scoring goals for us.

Anyway, having regretted my weakness once, I now find that Glen Whitman at Agoraphilia has written a widely-cited series of postings on the strange left-wing bias of the UN's healthcare metrics. Good to see this story getting the wider readership it deserves, particularly as the UN numbers are being used by Michael Moore in his film, Sicko.

And in a final twist to the story, Tim Worstall has a posting up today which shows that Neil H is still trying to tout the UN ranking as evidence that the NHS is better than the alternatives! When I've already shown him that the metric is a nonsense! What an extraordinary bit of shamelessness. Neil becomes more of an asset every day, doesn't he?