It really amazes me how there are controversial topics where one side never presents any actual facts or figures to back up their stance. I would think that, in the absence of any hard evidence, the controversy would disappear. Yet it seems that anecdote and rhetoric alone are enough to sustain extreme controversy. Both health care and climate change in the US are excellent examples of this.

Edit: the statement about R&D costs is one excellent example of this. This thread is not the first place I've heard it, by any means. It's inevitably framed as the US subsidizing the rest of the world but without any quantitative analysis of it. The assertion evaporates when you actually look at the numbers, of course. Another excellent example was when my father claimed, no doubt prompted by right-wing talk radio, that the life expectancy gap was driven by the much higher murder rate in the US compared to European countries. Upon plugging in the numbers, I found that, assuming an absolute worst case (every murdered American is an infant, losing all ~80 years of life), dropping the US murder rate to zero would increase American life expectancy by six months.

I get how people can be wrong sometimes, but the way it spreads, the way people hear things and never check them or even apply a basic smell test, and the way these complete falsehoods manage to shape national debate is just crazy.