Statistics can be manipulated

Your recent article about emergency medical response times for ambulance service in Spokane made it seem as if our citizens must pay much, much more to achieve quicker response times.

Anyone with a background in statistics would immediately deduce that the numbers presented by the “expert” that make Spokane look so bad were the result of cherry picking. As for “saving” those who have had heart attacks and are blue on the floor only to awaken in a damaged and sometimes semi-vegetative state, many of us who are over 70 have given explicit instructions. Those instructions are, “Do not resuscitate.”

How many of us have friends who have said, after artificially lingering on a few more months, “I just wish they had let me go when it was my time”?

Finally, a Google search under American Medical Response/complaints will be instructive regarding the business ethics and honesty of the nationwide firm currently providing our ambulance service. It would seem that nothing sells so well as fear mongering about death.

Leland Alkire

Spokane