Medicaid kills? "Causality is the first casualty." | Hacker News Reader

Medicaid kills? "Causality is the first casualty."

theincidentaleconomist.com

18 pointsgronkie7 comments

The most important line in this article, for anyone who wants to compare one set of medical/insurance/etc related interventions to another:

Bottom line: once again, we find that XXX is shown to be [good/bad] for health, but only if proper econometric techniques are employed. Sadly, it is easier to ignore the need for such techniques and to misunderstand them than to do the work to educate oneself in their use. The real tragedy is that it leads to an unwarranted conclusion YYY...

I.e., a fuck lot of stuff affects health outcomes and without controlling for them, you get nonsense.

I get the sense that the person who wrote those the original article that this story replies to didn't care that they were misrepresenting the studies, because they care more about the political implications than science.

Isn't that usually the case when people make comparisons like this?

See also "omfg, US life expectancy slightly lower than EU, socialized medicine now!" Or similarly "omfg, EU cancer survival rate slightly lower than US, no death panels!"

> Isn't that usually the case when people make comparisons like this?

Yes, and it sickens me.

People who aren't capable of reading the studies now ignore them as meaningless because, while they are unable to verify what's being said, they know that people will twist it to their own ends.

So something can have incontrovertible scientific support but, thanks to intentional misrepresentations by lobbyists, politicians and the like, a significant fraction of the populace will not accept it, because they've heard scientific studies trotted out to support both sides and they don't know who is lying.

Well, he was repudiating a politically motivated point that was fairly ridiculous, "medicaid recipients get sick a lot therefore medicaid is making them sick".

Well, it's not PATENTLY ridiculous. There's a fairly extensive literature base to suggest that many of our modern treatments are not efficacious and either make outcomes worse or at the least add side effects. Though I find it unlikely that treatments could be SO bad that the effect of being treated more would be reduced life span.

The article that this article is criticizing may not be objectively seeking truth, as seems to be the case unfortunately, but we shouldn't reject its conclusion as on-face impossible

Some examples:

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damne...

Also you could look at, for psychiatry, Robert Whitaker's book Anatomy of an epidemic.

Well, sure, any given treatment could be a net negative. That's perfectly reasonable.

However, saying that the net sum of all treatment is a net negative is indeed patently ridiculous. The guy who wrote it probably has pretty good health insurance, too, just saying.

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