Last weekend, as I trudged through the airport, I saw a copy of Time on a magazine rack. When I noticed the title of the cover story, “The Sorry State of American Health Care,” I couldn’t resist the urge to buy a copy.

Predictably, the article was just a recitation of the same old tired arguments and phony statistics repeated over and over (and over) by the advocates of government-run health care.

The phony stats parroted in the piece include our old friend infant mortality. As I pointed out a few days ago, infant mortality rates tell us nothing about a nation’s health care system, but Time doesn’t care about that:

In 2005, the most recent year for which data are available, about 7 babies out of every 1,000 live births in the U.S. died before their first birthday.

The piece admits that this represents another incremental gain in a century of progress, but then adds a black cloud to the silver lining by repeating the following faux-stat from the OECD:

But globally, it still places us 29th in the world, behind Cuba and Singapore and on a par with Poland and Slovakia.

The piece repeats equally specious canards about life expectancy, the uninsured, preventable deaths, and preventive medicine. All of its assertions about these things have been long ago debunked. 

But this is not about information. The goal is to create a sense of crisis that will cause the public to accept government-run health care. And this “news” magazine has been engaged in this project for a long time.

Obvious and Urgent … Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, and even the American Medical Association, which fought Medicare for so long, are all agreed that a new federal role is necessary to help Americans pay their bills.

In other words, government intervention is urgently needed to avoid catastrophe. The only problem is that the above passage is from a piece that the magazine published in 1971.

That’s right. These people have been giving us the Chicken Little treatment for nearly 40 years. This is reminiscent of the hysterical nonsense they publish about “global climate change.”

But that’s another story.