You’ll never guess what couple is one of the first out of the gate distorting the Oregon Medicaid study:
I’m sure you are all shocked they are doing what they are paid to do.
Douchebag Tag Team
by John Cole| 72 Comments
This post is in: Glibertarianism, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Pink Himalayan Salt, Technically True but Collectively Nonsense
MoeLarryAndJesus
Suderman? More like Pseudoman.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Considering she failed basic calculator, I’m pretty sure basic statistics is well beyond her capabilities.
Joel
Shadyman and McCurdle, assemble!
Poopyman
@Everybody:
Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. Now it’s McDoodyhead and Suderman that’ll get quoted. Not the original study, not the folks who try to point out the difference between “no effect” and “insufficient data”. The MSM don’t do nuance and they like to quote their own.
Same as it ever was.
joes527
McArdle’s headline is deceptive, but stays just short of being an outright lie. (I do not vouch for the contents)
Suderman’s headline is an outright lie.
We need a blogger ethics panel.
Walker
Saying that the study “found that Medcaid has no effect” is a lie. It did not find yes or no.
I am saying evil over stupid in this case.
Spaghetti Lee
Why is the Lonely Conservative so lonely? He has so many friends in the media.
ranchandsyrup
The only certain thing is that we are all at fault for not “getting” what they’re saying. Authorial intent fallacy, how in the fuck does it work?
Napoleon
I cannot think of a better example of how the right is disconnected from reality and honesty than this. Seriously, does anyone thing that with the advanced medicine we have in the year 2013 that giving people medical aid (which is what Medicaid does) vs. not (which is basically what is would happen) would actually make no difference? If you believe that why would anyone seek medical care ever?
(By the way, the cost effectiveness of different types of care of the quality is a whole different series of questions, I am just talking about the very basic does it make a positive difference, nothing more).
danimal
I wonder what the McSuderman ideal world looks like. Once they’re done lovingly deconstructing the welfare state (always for the benefit of the serfs!), what do they do next? If government is removed from providing health care, and an epidemic breaks out, what do the libertarian-ish McSudermans expect to happen? How is life going to be better?
I just don’t get libertarian types. Are they cruel idealogues who don’t care about human life, or are they naively stupid political operators counting on liberals to push back effectively against the cruel edges of their philosophy?
John Cole
@danimal:
Yes.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Poopyman:
And they’ll never pay a price for it ever, because they’re still ‘Serious People’. Meanwhile, folks like Krugman can be right all the day long on whatever subject but because they’re not ‘Serious’ or because they’re ‘Shrill’, they’re right for the wrong reasons and must therefore still be shunned, disregarded, and otherwise denigrated.
Because this country simply cannot subsist without its Hippie Punching.
Trollhattan
“The Lonely Conservative” eh? Being wedded to McMegan must really be an endless string of thrills and surprises.
Go forth, my flying monkeys, and bring this disinformation to the masses. Now be gone!
Tom Levenson
This is one worth counterattacking hard. I’m basically off the McArdle beat; she’s become an increasingly hard to find blatherer on a failing website.
But this is part of her long running effort to make common wisdom out of the bold counterfactual that more access to health care is bad for the individuals thus enabled.
And it’s bullshit, both on the facts and on her labored attempt to make a statistical/experimental argument. See Aaron Carrol and Austin Frakt, (via Krugthulu) for details.
See also the money graf that Carroll and Frakt quote from the original study:
I’ll try to rev up to take a whack at this, but overwhelmed am I right now, so I make no promises.
Spaghetti Lee
Their blogs are called ‘Asymmetrical Information’ and ‘Hit & Run’? Geez, talk about your truth in advertising.
J.W. Hamner
Le sigh
A large part of me wants to go over there and knock heads about their apparent lack of statistical literacy but one can only spend so many hours arguing on the internet without your head exploding.
If Levenson or somebody else decides to tackle this one I would just note :
1) small sample of sick people (1/3 of cohort were 19-34) whose bp, cholesterol, or plasma glucose might be impacted by two years of treatment
2) confidence intervals are huge. In incidence of elevated bp for example they say could be -7.2 to +4.5. A reduction of 7.2 from 16.3 would be a 50% decrease in hypertension and would obviously be monumental.
Schlemizel
@danimal:
The free market will provide! Seriously, they are that stupid
Amir Khalid
And today in the Daily Beast, Mrs Suderman is defending Matthew Yglesias’ notorious Bangladesh clothing factory post.
To read her, which of course I recommend against, you’d think that industrial safety standards were a foreign imposition on Bangladesh by sanctimonious Westerners; that people in Bangladesh weren’t bothered about the hundreds of deaths; that no one was under arrest or facing charges.
Morzer
Grifters gotta grift. Let them ride their failed careers down into obscurity and walk-on parts in Glenn Beck’s nether regions.
SatanicPanic
@Napoleon: You remember when one of the arguments against Obamacare was that there wouldn’t be enough doctors to go around? I guess that wasn’t a real concern?
Mnemosyne
@Napoleon:
IIRC, the study was able to show improved quality of life for the patients who had Medicaid over the patients who did not. What they were not able to show was improved mortality. As I understand it, what they may have shown is that medical care via Medicaid made people more comfortable and more able to continue to be as active as possible without necessarily extending their lives.
And again IMO the “quality of life” standard is an important discussion to have. I know it makes the right wing start shouting, “Death panels!” but I do think it’s a good thing to improve someone’s day-to-day life even if doing so doesn’t automatically make them live longer.
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
You’d also think there was no rioting in the streets by angry workers demanding the heads of the managers responsible for the collapse. But I guess that wouldn’t fit the narrative about how it’s okay to treat impoverished people as badly as you want because they don’t know or want anything better.
Xenos
The expanded medicaid has been around for what, a year or two?
And they can’t demonstrate a significant improvement in mortality yet?
As a form of magic, medicine just sucks!
scav
@Amir Khalid: “that people in Bangladesh weren’t bothered about the hundreds of deaths; that no one was under arrest or facing charges.”
!
Professional Journalistic Illiteracy and Ignorance must be the new Must-Have Cheese-Possessing Buzzy Skill.
Kay
@Morzer:
It’s still disgusting, though.
I hate throwing regular non-famous people to these hounds. They just rip them to shreds.
I can’t listen to it. “Blah blah blah, THE POOR, blah”
Like they care. Did any of them pay any attention to Medicaid before there was a threat it might be offered to more people?
Mr Stagger Lee
@danimal: To them Utopia on the highest plane, with rainbow unicorns and an Emerald castle where the wizards Jesus Bomberil and Ayn Goldberry Rand live and every day is mining hard rock candy mountain. To us, Orwell meets Dickens with a little Atwood and some Soylent Green thrown in.
Xantar
So hold on a second. At one point a few years ago, I had no health insurance. Eventually, I went on the individual market and purchased a policy with Kaiser Permanente. Over the next two years, I visited my primary care physician once. Basically, thanks to insurance I was able to find out that my cholesterol is pretty good. Otherwise, my blood pressure hasn’t changed and I haven’t become a diabetic. In other words, having insurance pretty much did zero to improve my health metrics that Katherine Baicker et al. were measuring over the next two years. So why was anybody expecting the Oregon Medicaid Experiment to detect improvements on such limited metrics in such a short time?
danimal
@Schlemizel: I wish you were wrong.
Conservatives and libertarians would create a vast, immiserated wasteland if their current policy portfolio were implemented. They know it, too, and don’t appear to care.
ETA: And Mr Stagger Lee gives the unfortunately correct read on my comment.
Napoleon
@Mnemosyne:
Which is a big deal.
srv
Shorter: What is the point of keeping all these old people around? All they do is suck up entitlements, drive slow in the left lane, vote Republican.
Megan is just one of those glass half-full people.
ChrisNYC
She’s a rational actor, right? When’s she going to drop her health insurance and start spending the money on things that will improve her life?
Xantar
@Mnemosyne:
The thing is in order to detect a change in mortality, you’d either have to survey a very, very, large population or you’d have to survey them for a very long time. Preferably both. Even among the poor in the US, not that many people are dying in any given year. I’ve seen talks by Katherine Baicker. She’s an excellent researcher. I’ll bet she’s aware of the limitations of her study and probably even discusses it within her paper.
Poopyman
@Xantar:
Because SHUT UP!
Fuckin’ hippies ……
Frankensteinbeck
@danimal:
You are overthinking this. The thought process goes as far as ‘I have found a fact that sounds like it proves my point’ and stops. They’ve gotten what they wanted, and do not need to go further. Even the point they’re trying to make is loosely defined, and is purely emotional, like ‘I’ve proven those dirty hippies wrong, ha ha ha’ or ‘I’m rich because I’m a better person’. For pure libertarians it’s ‘I’m the only person who understands the world and you’re all cudlips.’
EDIT – Note, humans are able to think further than this, but it’s unnatural and requires effort. The media and conservatism are full of people who do actively dislike putting forth that effort. It does not reward them.
EconWatcher
Somewhat related: I’m usually a fan of The Financial Times, but they published a new piece by Rogoff and Reinhart today, continuing to offer them as leading authorities on debt and growth. Proving, yet again, that being a Very Serious Person means never having to say you’re sorry.
Redshift
@danimal:
Here’s my guess: People he knows and cares about will have more money because government can spend less. Nobody else matters, and if they die in the street and reduce the surplus population, it’s all good. Nothing like an epidemic will ever affect him because freedom.
Morzer
@Kay:
I am willing to go on record endorsing impalement for McArdle and Suderman. They’d have to pay for their own stakes, of course.
Cassidy
OT, but I’m gonna do a little hijack to brag: I passed my state firefighter exam.
jl
No time to read comments. But the only properly designed randomized trial of the health effects of different insurance coverage was the Rand Health Insurance Experiment. It found significant mortality effects (MORTALITY effects) of different types of coverage. The principal investigator, Joseph Newhouse, as said this was an official finding.
The Rand study lasted 15 years. Two years is not enough to evaluate significant health effects.
What this is, like the Reinhart and Rogoff study, is interested parties cherry picking researh results and using them in an intellectually sloppy way to push their own agenda.
The fact that supposed wonks like Ezra Klein were very sloppy about misreporting the results of previous research about the health effects of different types of insurance coverage (saying that there are none, when research has found that there are) has not helped.
beltane
@EconWatcher: It’s not only that being a Very Serious Person means never having to say sorry, it’s that being a Very Serious Person meas you more infallible than the pope. No matter how wrong a Very Serious Person is proven to be, they are still always right.
Morzer
@Cassidy:
Congratulations!
tbogg
@danimal:
Have sex, but each one is responsible for their own orgasm, because to give another pleasure is just enabling them and creates dependency.
Alex S.
@Spaghetti Lee:
Hmm… asymmetrical information is a reason why markets sometimes fail. Why did McArdle choose that name?
@Spaghetti Lee:
And I thought he was a libertarian.
Boots Day
@joes527: Suderman’s headline is an outright lie.
This really can’t be repeated often enough. The authors of the study went out of their way to say there was no significant finding. Suderman is today’s Howard Kurtz, either too lazy to read past a headline or so dishonest that he doesn’t care whether he’s writing the truth or not. It’s probably a bit of both.
scav
@Cassidy: congrats!
Kay
@Morzer:
Ha hah. West Virginia expands coverage.
The nation’s leading opinionists are going to be livid :)
Kay
@Cassidy:
Yay! Now you don’t have to study ever again.
PeakVT
McAddled and Suckerman seem intent on wresting the worst internet couple title from Instahack and Ole Mrs. Perfesser.
EconWatcher
@tbogg:
OK, you won the thread, but it’s really not fair for Michael Jordan to show up for a game of pick-up ball in the suburbs.
Cassidy
@Kay: Oh no. Once I get hired I’ve got the rookie exam, Engineer’s exam, then Officer exams. And, I’ll be starting Paramedic NLT Jan of next year. Today just means I can get hired and astart working, lol.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Cassidy: Friend of mine, no shrinking violet or wimp, in excellent shape, failed out. As did a relative of mine, former US Army combat grunt. Both rather quickly. I saw the one’s pictures of the training. Yikes.
So congratulations.
Morzer
@Kay:
I suspect they’ll be the color of decorous rose pink Himalayan rock salt.
Michele C
@Amir Khalid: I know you told me not to read it, but then the link was there and I wanted to know what you were talking about. It drained the life out of me.
I keep trying to say what got me the most, but each time I do, I end up deleting and trying again because everything “got me the most” in that stream of sanctimonious drivel.
Praise be that the Bangladeshis are actually out protesting and arresting and doing something while McMegan sits in her “comfy” office and pontificates aimlessly against all that is decent.
Cassidy
@Forum Transmitted Disease: When we got to finally do some live burns, it was exhilirating. I’ve got some pics of the fire right up on me and it was great. The really high ladder sucked, though.
Runt
And will the McArdles mark their beliefs to market by cancelling their no doubt expensive health insurance?
Somehow, I doubt it.
Dexter's new approach
@Xantar:
That’s correct. I read a study before the ACA came down that also failed to show a mortality benefit for people with private HC insurance vs those without. It’s simply too hard to do a clean large long study.
The problem with this study is obviously the small sample size and the limited term. It was destined to fall short by research standards; certainly Phamra would never design a study like this because implicit in the results – if you want to simply conclude Medicaid doesn’t improve health – is that all those expensive statins and insulin drugs don’t do shit.
Morzer
You know, the supreme irony in all of this is a pair of willfully ignorant wing-nuts suddenly pretending to care about data and interpretation of same. They’ve spent their worthless little lives carefully avoiding facing facts, much less learning the basics of statistical analysis – and yet, here they are suddenly slithering out to trumpet their tender passion for such concerns.
SatanicPanic
@Cassidy: Rad!
Forum Transmitted Disease
@tbogg: Damn dude, you’re like a hydrogen bomb. Fly in, drop the comment to end all comments, fly away and admire the smoking ruin left in your wake.
rikyrah
then tell these muthafuckas to give up THEIR health insurance…
if it’s not that important
Chris
@danimal:
On the contrary, they care very much. It’s what they want – at least those of them with money or power. They want a return to an age when there was no safety net for the little people, because then the little people will have to come crawling to them for all the bare necessities of life, theirs to give and take away on a whim. It’s the sort of power and control they had a hundred years ago and they really, really want it back.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Those Tweets are like M&Ms of stupid.
the Conster
They’re typical libertarians who describe behavior that’s against human nature because the practical solution is against their ideology, but not enough to actually practice it, just preach it.
? Martin
So, what are the odds that neither one actually wrote columns, rather they merely transcribed their sex talk?
MattR
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Wouldn’t that make him the Enola Gay?
Seanly
@Amir Khalid:
The supposedly liberal Matt Yglesias is a good friend of McMegan.
TAPX486
Since access to health care is such a waste of money I wonder if they will cancel their health insurance policies?
Central Planning
@Tom Levenson:
I’ve heard Aaron Carrol on Stand Up with Pete Dominick (SiriusXM 104 in the morning). He seems quite knowledgeable, and he does a good job debunking all sorts of medical myths, and political myths about healthcare.
pseudonymous in nc
@Amir Khalid:
Of course she is: McArdle is a sociopath, and Yglesias is McCurdling more every day.
PurpleGirl
@Cassidy: Yay. You go. That’s great.
ruemara
@Cassidy: Congrats! This means you have to pose in uniform, as firefighters are sessy bastards. I can only go by our local fire guys. Try not to fall into the trap of being a government worker and a full on conservative anti-guv guy, because I keep seeing that combo around me. Serious note, be careful.
AA+ Bonds
(Full disclosure: a man has chosen to lie with Megan McArdle.)