Flippancy v. Dishonesty
Left-wing columnist David Sirota takes me to task in a blogpost for being too flippant in a TV debate yesterday morning. He's right too. I should not have shrugged off his point in the dismissive manner he correctly condemns here. I'm guilty, and I'm sorry.
On the other hand Sirota is guilty too, and of something more serious: the use of bogus statistics to distort. Let's go to the tape.
Sirota claimed on television that a Harvard study found that 45,000 Americans a year die because they lack health insurance.
It's important to understand that this number is not based on any actual observation of actual uninsured people.
Instead, it is based on older studies that compared groups of uninsured and insured people, and found higher mortality rates among the uninsured.
That observation comports with common sense - and supports the case for actions, which I favor, to extend insurance coverage more widely and ultimately universally.
Now comes the caveat, the thing that separates common sense observation from fiction with numbers.
We can see that the uninsured are more likely to die. But are they more likely to die BECAUSE they are uninsured? The uninsured are also more likely to smoke. They are more likely to be overweight. And they are more likely to get shot.
The Harvard number is calculated on the assumption that the uninsured are 40% more likely to die than the insured. But former Congressional Budget Office Director June O'Neill computed that after adjusting for smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity, and other risk factors, the uninsureds' excess risk of death dropped to as low as 3%.
No doubt: it's risky to be uninsured, and we should act to reduce uninsurance. David Sirota favorably cites a study by the Urban Institute. Yet the Urban Institute itself pre-emptively rebuked Sirota's abuse of its work.
Limitations of the current analysis
At the most basic level, the above estimates are not precise “body counts.” Rather, the reader should view them as reasonable indicators of the general magnitude of excess mortality that results from uninsurance.
Again: sorry for my own excess flippancy in responding to Sirota. WIll he take equal responsibility for his much graver offense of abusing statistics for polemical purposes?