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While this article points out some potential problems in the methods used to derive that headline political figure, its own methodology seems to have pretty ser
by tialaramex 3y ago
While this article points out some potential problems in the methods used to derive that headline political figure, its own methodology seems to have pretty serious flaws. The most I'd take from this is "This is such a bad problem that even when you try pretty hard to look in the wrong place you find it anyway".
This study deliberately does not - just for example - count it as a "medical bankruptcy" if you weren't hospitalized. So magically every person who was bankrupted by the cost of their must-take prescription medicine, they don't count because they need to be admitted to hospital to count for this study.
- threemux 3y agoThe thing to take from it is not that the figure the linked study arrives at is "right", but that the cited 2/3 figure is seriously flawed to the point that it shouldn't be cited. As it is, the 2/3 statistic is mainly used to score political points and indeed one of the authors of the original study that came up with the 60% number is Elizabeth Warren. Now, you could say she participated in her capacity as an academic, but I personally have a hard time believing she would have put her name on the paper if it had found, say, 4% of bankruptcies came from medical debt.
- tialaramex 3y agoWhy not? 4% is also awful. As a politician you'd probably say "One in every 25" rather than 4% if you wanted to emphasise that it's unacceptable.
- threemux 3y agoYeah I mean you can certainly have the opinion that any amount of medical bankruptcies greater than 0 is unacceptable, but that has nothing to do with my original point that the 2/3 number should not be cited in discussions about bankruptcy.
- trashtester 3y agoIt's still pretty clearly far less wrong than stating 2/3 of bankruptcies are caused by medical costs. If people are arguing about whether the Earth is flat or spherical, you cant use the fact that both are "wrong" (as the Earth is closer to an ellipsoid) to say that "flat" is as correct as "spherical".
- singleshot_ 3y agoIf a study concludes that x/y bankruptcies are caused by z but makes no assertion of the total number of bankruptcies, I would be very suspicious that the author was forwarding his agenda via a weird counting methodology.