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"In the case of the towel bid, hospital administrators were shown a PowerPoint presentation (a copy of which she gave to me) indicating that going with the Medline and Medical Action bids would save them between 6 and 29 percent. But this was relative to the same companies’ bids the previous year, not the bids offered by other vendors."

I'm interested in seeing these slides and sent a request to the article's author.

Were the decision makers present aware there were other vendors? If so, how was this data not called into question? It would be interesting to see if the data was presented in a completely misleading way or if there was some level of laziness and complacency on the decision-makers' part as well.

Regardless, misleading presentations are always interesting to examine, such as Tufte's assessment of the presentation given to NASA officials before the Columbia disaster (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...).

Edit: Just received a reply from the author that she's unable to share the presentation as the person that originally shared it has been "subject to legal harassment." Lame!

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