Math is hard. Let's go right-wing!

Michelle Malkin is very excited about a flaw she thinks she's found in the standard study of the effects of being uninsured on mortality.

Malkin notes that studies frequently find that a moderate fraction of those self-reporting as uninsured - 10%, say - turn out to be insured after all. She thinks this means... actually I've read through her post four times now, and I'm not sure what she thinks it means. She's just thrilled to have found a flaw.

Suppose, if you will, that being uninsured does indeed have some negative impact on health. We can probably trust that this is true; if not, the insurance companies are even more nefarious than we think.

Then if some people in the group labelled "uninsured" are in fact insured, this will decrease the effect of not having insurance found by the study. It means being uninsured is worse for you than the study finds, and people are dying from lack of insurance at a higher rate than is routinely reported. As the author of the study put it - Malkin quotes him in the post, but doesn't appear to have parsed it - "If present, such misclassification might dilute the true effect of uninsurance in our sample."

(To head off a possible objection, the figure for the number of uninsured Americans, and thus the extrapolation to the number of needless deaths we get annually, is not dependent on self-reporting.)

Similarly, if not having health insurance was just a temporary condition for the people in the study at the time they were surveyed - if they've all gotten health insurance since - that means that the difference in death rates is due not to people going all this time without insurance, but people missing out on insurance only briefly! We thought it was this bad for you to go your life uninsured - but actually it's that bad for you to go just a year or two without insurance.

Sorting out statistics like this can be difficult, so let's make an analogy with cookies. Let's say you make two batches of cookies. You follow the exact same recipe, only with one batch you use yummy chocolate chips... or maybe those big chocolate chunks, let's say semi-sweet, from Ghirardelli... sorry, I got distracted there.

Anyway, with the second batch, you replace the chocolate chips with lab rat poop. Then you feed people your cookies and see their reactions. Turns out people think the chocolate chip cookies are five times as good as the rat poop cookies.

Then, like in those old Folger's commercials, it turns out that your rat poop supplies were actually only half rat poop and were half chocolate chips. Does that mean rat poop is better than you thought? No. It means that rat poop is more disgusting than you thought - twice as disgusting, in fact.

For the rest, Malkin seems to have the routine right-wing problem of not understanding that people can be convinced by study that they should believe in something like health-care reform, rather than the normal conservative mode of people who already believe something doing bogus studies to try and prove their point. I guess that's kind of how it goes.

Moral of the story: if you are in no way a scientist, and you are also an idiot, you probably shouldn't try to debunk peer-reviewed papers.

Careful what enters your brain

Hey, this blogging every day thing is hard.

Yglesias notes that cable news messes with his head, yet it's on around the clock in the average Congressional office.

I think this sort of thing is a big deal. I tell it to friends who claim to watch things skeptically all the time. You have to be careful what you let into your head; even if you think you're just watching it to 'see what other people are saying' or something, unless you are very mindful it will affect you. And you actually really don't need to know what Glenn Beck is saying. Just turn it off.

Laws Have Consequences

Lots of people have noted that, in the name of compromise and small government, the Blue Dogs are setting us up for a situation where millions of Americans are required by law to pay premiums to insurance companies they despise for coverage of little value. This is probably not a recipe for victory for the Democrats.

There's a broader point here that I think is getting lost, though. Throughout the media and centrist politics, there's very little recognition that most of the political impact of an action comes after it has been taken and people see what the consequences are. Sure, there could be a temporary hit in the polls if the American people think we've passed a health care bill that's too liberal (not that that's going to happen.) But within a couple of years, public opinion is going to be largely about what the bill actually did, not the debates of 2009. Accusations that we're giving health care to 'illegals' make noise now, but in the end that either happens or it doesn't. People like what's happened to their insurance, or they don't. If you think your grandmother is going to be sentenced to death by panel, you are reasonably likely to notice in the future whether or not this occurs. If sending more troops to Afghanistan solves the problems there, it's probably a good political move regardless of how it polls this week, and vice versa; you may recall invading Iraq was a pretty popular idea back when we did it.

That's not to say the politics doesn't color future perceptions of the bill, or that it won't have big implications for the 2010 election. But a lot of people seem to have this notion that politics and policy are perfectly separate. Policies this big can affect the electorate for generations, particularly if politicians are, as a friend put it, brave enough to take credit for doing popular things. The current state of political loyalties among African-Americans and Southern whites is not based on who said exactly what during the debate of the Civil Rights Act.

This kind of indifference to the political consequences of real-world outcomes has a lot of troubling implications beyond writing a lousy health care bill. It feeds the centrists' addiction to compromise, of course. It also raises the question of exactly what they went to Washington for anyway.