alt Hacker News> The first issue with this is that the gap between the uninsured and insured is not necessarily due to the lack of insurance. It could be due to factors associated with not having insurance, like living on the streets, being schizophrenic, being poor, and so on.
Made up perspective to justify his angle.
Not having healthcare access for a lot of people is 100% a policy choice. Waved off here by a list that really says why we should have universal healthcare; some people are mental and not aware they could have access without the stupid policy decision.
Just strings together sentences to ultimately make a reductive point about arithmetic and their own literacy.
Despite Yale's issues they're still a better source than random blogger with high school math literacy.
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> random blogger with high school math literacy
He's actually a well-known and widely promoted political activist on X. His niche is using technocratic language and a whiff of 'analysis' to advance MAGA policies.
The point he is making is valid: these groups are not randomly selected and are not representative of one another. Hence, it is not that simple to extrapolate from one to the other.
Would free healthcare reduce deaths in uranium miners that are smokers? Probably some, but would it bring that to the same levels as non-smoking, non miners? Unlikely so. Hence it would be silly to pretend all the cancer deaths are due to lack of health care.
The smoking uranium miner example has a surprisingly realistic story, comes from real data; the dangers of radon in the basement were deduced from comparing cancer rates in smoking uranium miners with high radon in their basements, then they removed what they thought was the smoking and uranium contribution, then fitted to the general population.