Comments on: No Data, Please, We’re Americans

By: Gerald Fnord

Gerald Fnord — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 22:56:11 +0000

Saying that Europeans, can do something better than good Merkins is un-American. This country is the best, greatest gift that God has ever given Mankind on the face of the Earth, and they’re a bunch of soccer-loving, socialist, f-gg-ts who don’t worship Jesus enough, and anything that would make us more like them would be degeneration.

By: Barry

Barry — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:33:48 +0000

I’d like to point out to the oh-its-so-complicated-and-there-are-so-many-confounders crowd that this also applies to any comparisons which justify things about the USA.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 20:56:55 +0000

“it becomes apparent that a majority of our fellow citizens actually prefer being told what to do and when to do it.”

Or maybe a majority of our fellow citizens would just like to know that they can get the health care they need.

By: Jonny Scrum-half

Jonny Scrum-half — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:58:19 +0000

Poll results would only result in an exponential increase in unhappiness among those who value individual liberty, as it becomes apparent that a majority of our fellow citizens actually prefer being told what to do and when to do it.

By: adina

adina — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:38:29 +0000

Data from other countries are so chock full of potential confounders, that anyone who tries to explain that a superior result is due to any specific policy is completely overreaching, at best. The U.S. is different from other countries in thousands of ways, and, if I wanted to, I could point to only one of those differences and claim that this is the reason for any given desirable/undesirable outcome. Bring on the data. But don’t think that having them will provide us any definitive conclusions, rather than simply inspire some hypotheses.

By: Sam McManus

Sam McManus — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:22:56 +0000

The problem with these expansive programs like UHC is that often, they come down to actuarial tables and the like; nitty gritty data sets with many variables that the average person (myself included) simply don’t have the patience or ability to read correctly. This cuts both ways of the left/right divide, as one could make the argument that either the wonks in DC don’t know what they’re doing either or that the average republican voter is being obstructionist on policy issues they only know the broad strokes of. I see many more moral arguments about health care than I do pragmatic ones (and many many more arguments about what beer Obama should be serving tonight).

By: Tim Lee

Tim Lee — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:08:28 +0000

The problem is that data do not speak for themselves. In order to know whether a given figure is meaningful, you need to know an awful lot about both how the figure was calculated and what policies surrounded its generation. When your audience is ignorant of basic facts about a country (as virtually all of us are about the majority of the world’s countries) it’s far too easy for ideologues with axes to grind to cherry-pick statistics that support whatever point they’re trying to make.

To make this concrete: liberals like to cite the higher life expectancy and lower health costs of other countries. Free-market types like to cite long waiting lists and sub-par innovation. While my sympathy is with the latter, I have to acknowledge that I really have no idea where to start in comparing these kinds of competing proposals. I simply don’t know enough about the other countries’ health care systems, cultures, fiscal environments, etc to know whether these things are because of or in spite of their health care systems.

Moreover, even if we establish that, say, Poland has a particularly good health care system, it’s far from obvious which aspects of the system are worth emulating. Again everyone will cherry-pick those aspects that are most similar to their preferred policies. And again, without knowing a lot about the health care systems in question, I have no way of distinguishing actual insight from clever bullshit.

These problems aren’t as severe with states because because states are much more similar to each other than the US is to other nations. I read the language, know people from other states, and know my way around a budget document. So it’s much easier for me to evaluate claims about the merits of competing state health care systems and reach a conclusion about why one might out-perform another.

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:33:06 +0000

I agree throughout and kudos on balancing. It will be very hard for some Democrats, having explained all the benefits to another model if many of us still don’t want that model. It will be reinforcing/frustrating to Republicans if many of us don’t find the translation of a European model to be emotionally upsetting. But what we clearly don’t need is happy Democrats or reassured Republicans.