
Medicaid kills? "Causality is the first casualty." - gronkie
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/on-gottliebs-favorite-medicaid-outcomes-studies/
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yummyfajitas
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.

~~~
Natsu
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
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!"

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

~~~
MaxGabriel
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...](http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-
and-medical-science/8269/)

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

~~~
jbooth
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.

