Logic is never terminal

As Mark Twain once observed, “There are liars, damned liars, and statisticians.”

His point was that statistics can be used to prove just about anything, provided that the persons using them are ignorant or unscrupulous and their audiences gullible.

For instance, have you ever noticed how there are more sick people in hospitals than anywhere else? Makes you think, doesn’t it? Hospitals must be unhealthy places, right? That’s logical, isn’t it?

And what about automobile repair shops, car hospitals? They’re just as bad, right -- full of cars that don’t run properly? You wouldn’t want to take your vehicle to one of those places and risk having it malfunction, would you?

This logic is so twisted that it’s easy to unravel. Of course, hospitals are full of sick people, because hospitals are places people go when they get sick.

Likewise with car repair shops. They’re full of malfunctioning cars, because people take their cars there when they’re acting up.

Imagine what a crafty or foolish person could say about hospices!

Did you know that more people die in hospices than anywhere else? It’s true. Hospices almost always are the last stop in health care. The survival rate is virtually zero.

Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Of course, hospices are facilities for the terminally ill. They’re full of dying people because people go there when they’re dying.

Paul and Saprina Henry don’t seem to get this.

Their mother, Ida Mae Henry, was a resident at Harbor Hospice in Beaumont more than two years ago. On July 6, 2010, she was transferred to Pinnacle Health’s Beaumont facility. Nine months later, on March 28, 2011, she died.

Now, nearly a year and a half later, the Henry children are suing both facilities in Jefferson County District Court for their mother’s allegedly wrongful death -- a death that occurred nine months after she left the hospice to enter the other facility.

Somehow, the logic of the suit eludes us.

9/10/12