Ironslave
Mecca V.I.P.
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- Joined
- Jul 12, 2006
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- 4,608
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Just thought I'd post this, one of my friends is a pretty hardcore liberal, and he posted this on his facebook, with the comments "Those opposed to single payer public health care, chew on this!"
Soooo.... I decided to give it a read over, and "chew on it", per say. The only reason I'm positing is just to show you that when you read any study/report which has findings in which there could be pretty big implications, it's essential to actually read it. My response:
Come on *****, you’re a bright guy, obviously I can’t be positive but I’m guessing you only read the snippet article, not the previous ‘study’ itself. Let’s go through this.
1) Was this a peer reviewed study? No, it wasn’t. I know they said they got their figures from a previous project that was published, but that doesn’t mean much, who knows what kind of leaps they could have made. This is just an article on their website which they run advocating a particular cause, it’s not scrutinized scientific work at all.
2) Without going through every bit of their methodology, their previous study is absolute crap and couldn’t be more cherry picked to get the result they want. They claimed that they performed a chi squared test to determine the relationship between insurance and mortality…. Really? Yet, for some reason, their results does not mention the results from this. Hmm….
Well… this alone got me pretty suspicious, so, being an epidemiology major and all, I went ahead and did it for them
. I used the percentages they listed of each group who died (3% of 6655 insured, means 200 insured people died… and 3.3% of 2350 uninsured, means 78 people without insurance died).
Here are the results, you can see for yourself as I took screenshots just to show that I went by exactly what they said in the paper, the results show that being uninsured is not even REMOTELY close to being in the ball park of significantly affecting mortality!...
Next, let’s look at another thing they said, word for word about the difference between the groups insured verses those uninsured:
“Uninsurance was associated with younger age, minority race/ethnicity, unemployment, smoking, exercise (less than 100 METs per month), self-rated health, and lower levels of education and income
Soooo.... I decided to give it a read over, and "chew on it", per say. The only reason I'm positing is just to show you that when you read any study/report which has findings in which there could be pretty big implications, it's essential to actually read it. My response:
Come on *****, you’re a bright guy, obviously I can’t be positive but I’m guessing you only read the snippet article, not the previous ‘study’ itself. Let’s go through this.
1) Was this a peer reviewed study? No, it wasn’t. I know they said they got their figures from a previous project that was published, but that doesn’t mean much, who knows what kind of leaps they could have made. This is just an article on their website which they run advocating a particular cause, it’s not scrutinized scientific work at all.
2) Without going through every bit of their methodology, their previous study is absolute crap and couldn’t be more cherry picked to get the result they want. They claimed that they performed a chi squared test to determine the relationship between insurance and mortality…. Really? Yet, for some reason, their results does not mention the results from this. Hmm….
Well… this alone got me pretty suspicious, so, being an epidemiology major and all, I went ahead and did it for them
. I used the percentages they listed of each group who died (3% of 6655 insured, means 200 insured people died… and 3.3% of 2350 uninsured, means 78 people without insurance died). Here are the results, you can see for yourself as I took screenshots just to show that I went by exactly what they said in the paper, the results show that being uninsured is not even REMOTELY close to being in the ball park of significantly affecting mortality!...
Next, let’s look at another thing they said, word for word about the difference between the groups insured verses those uninsured:
“Uninsurance was associated with younger age, minority race/ethnicity, unemployment, smoking, exercise (less than 100 METs per month), self-rated health, and lower levels of education and income
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