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A lot of issues with America's healthcare system boil down to what I call "the interception problem". A quarterback who throws an interception directly to a def
by pg_bot 8y ago
A lot of issues with America's healthcare system boil down to what I call "the interception problem". A quarterback who throws an interception directly to a defender without a wide receiver in the vicinity is treated the same as someone who hit a receivers hands and was tipped to a defender when you are looking at the stat sheet. Your perception of the analysis changes drastically if you actually observe the actions going on.
I'll take an example from the real world to illustrate my point. When you look at the data, the United States clearly has the highest infant mortality rate of developed countries. On its face it would seem that the United States is clearly failing pregnant women, and that this is a terrible problem that needs to be addressed. However, if you observe the differences between the data sets and actually view how deliveries happen in real life you see a different picture.
Not all pregnancies carry the same risk, and the US has a higher percentage of high risk pregnancies than other countries. If you compare people in the same cohorts the US fares a lot better. In layman's terms, we shouldn't treat an infant death from a 25 year old mother who carried to term the same as one from a 40 year old born a month premature. The US is also the most aggressive country in the world when it comes to attempting to save prematurely born children. We try and succeed at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world. I have failed to meet a person who thinks trying to save a prematurely born child is a bad thing. Yet it's those kind of actions that skew the stats.
We need more advanced medical statistics. I hope the sabermetrics revolution makes its way into the medical field. If more people are interested, I could probably expand my thoughts further with other examples that look bad on the surface, but actually aren't as bad as you think.