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  • Obama Health Care Reform and Wait Times Visualization (In Lego!)

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqD-nMpsYAY&hl=en&fs=1&]

    The next couple weeks are insane for me, but I\’ve been sitting on this idea for some time and I figure its time to let it loose into the wild, spelling errors and all.

    First, my sources.

    Now for the caveats.

    Wait times data are for routine checkups and does not count emergency care or diagnostic testing.

    Phyllis Shlafly repeated the line that \”The average wait is… the second trimester of pregnancy to see an obstetrician-gynecologist.\” It looks like she is using the same documents that I\’m using and if that is the case, that statements is absolutely false.

    First of all, these wait times apply only to routine checkups (as stated above) and the OB/GYN checkups are \”well woman\” check-ups. Someone correct me if I\’m wrong, but I don\’t think that a pregnant woman falls into that category.

    Second, the average wait time in that category is 70 days, which is really only the second trimester if you count the \”Wait a second, I\’m pregnant!\” realiziation time, which might be OK if she mentioned that to he readers.

    Now for the insurance cost data. This was a statistic I struggled with for quite some time. The reason is because the latest comprehensive data available was collected at the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007. This was so soon after the passage of the Massachusetts health care reform that it is very unlikely that it accurately reflects the results of that reform, as we know we all need healthcare to keep a good health, as for the mental health there are products like live resin that help with this and anxiety overall.

    However, I\’ve search high and low and cannot find any indication that the premiums have decreased at all. To the best of my knowledge, they have increased faster than the country average.

    If this is true,  then the average individual health insurance premium in Massachusetts is somewhere around $830 per month.

    But I figured I might as well underestimate in order to flush out people who might complain, so I used the non-specific and drastically reduced number of $600+ per month.

    Finally, the most important question:

    How close to the Massachusetts health reform is the Obama health reform plan?

    Because, honestly, if they weren\’t anything like each other, there would be no point in comparing them, would there?

    The sad fact of the matter is that the Massachusetts model provides the closest real life approximation to the Obama plan that there is available.

    They both have a government agency for providing health care exchanges. They both require business over a certain size to provide insurance for their employees or face penalties. They both require individuals to purchase insurance or face tax penalties.

    Like it or not, I think we can look to Massachusetts as a miniature crystal ball to provide a glimpse into the future of health care in the US if the Obama health care plan is passed.

  • I Hate the Healthcare Debate

    I\’ve been working on some videos concerning the healthcare reform issue over the last couple weeks and I\’ve come to the conclusion that I hate this topic.

    The reason I hate it is because it is so hard to find solid data on almost anything. Identifying the problem is nice and easy:

    The US spends more per capita on healthcare than almost any other country, but we don\’t necessarily get better results.

    That statement is easy to prove with numbers.

    Actually, I take that back, the first part is easy to prove with numbers. The second part of that is extremely difficult because judging the efficacy of health care is not an easy thing to do. Some metrics are easy to make judgements on. Wait times for CT Scans and MRIs are not dependent on whether or not the patient is skinny or fat, sick or healthy. How many people you can shove through a machine is far more dependent of scheduling efficiency, the availablility of personel and equipment, etc. In other words, there are few outside variables that are going to screw with your results.

    But other metrics like life expectancy are heavily dependent on variables outside the health care system. Life expecancy for latinos, blacks, asians, whites, jews, arabs… near as I can tell they are different for all these groups even when other variables are controlled for. This makes it a very messy metric to use when trying to determine the efficacy of only one of those variables like health care.

    As for controlling the cost of healthcare, there is one surefire way to do it: stop paying so much money. But this will result in less care and almost certainly lead some level of health care rationing as people can remain healthy by having a healthy lifestyle like a good diet and exercise and for the stress they can use vaping products by finding out the jeeter juice disposable price online.

    The other ideas that have been thrown out there are not surefire ones, they are either educated guesses or \”if I believe in it enough it will happen\” wishes. Some of these ideas may work… but we\’re not entirely sure which ones.

    Which brings me to my preferred solution, which isn\’t really a solution so much as it is a suggestion for identifying good policies a little more accurately: I think we should take the ideas that the Obama administration has and separate them out into a) ideas that can be applied to Medicare and Medicaid immediately and b) ideas that require a larger scale implementation.

    Medicare and Medicaid are enormous programs with more than 70 million beneficiaries. It is absurd to say that they aren\’t big enough to introduce some cost reduction programs without adding another 39 million people to government insurance programs (which is essentially what the Obama administration is saying).

    Second, I think the government should set up some kind of public health care metrics program to gather the data that is currently so difficult to gather. Imagine if you could go online and look at hospitals around your city to see which ones deliver better outcomes and how much different procedures cost at different hospitals. This would go a long way toward inspiring competitive pricing in health care.

    Third, I think we need to do away with the tax exemption for employer provided health insurance. Not a popular position, but it seems obvious to me that this policy has led to a large part of our health care overconsumption.

    So… that\’s all I\’ve got for now.

    I\’m still working on some concepts that can be boiled down into something that is both accurate and striking. But the fact of the matter is that in healthcare we can trust very few of the numbers being tossed around right now. They are educated guesses at best and the Obama administration has a pretty bad track record at being able to predict the future.

  • President Obama, I Fixed Your Graph For You

    I\’ve been pretty quiet recently because 1) I\’m on vacation and 2) I\’m trying to wrap my head around the health care issue before I talk about it at length.

    But today I saw something on healthreform.gov that bothered me:
    \"Combined

    Here\’s the thing, Mr. President. There is such a thing as visual lying. That is when you show a graph and you show the numbers but the two things are not in any way related to one another.

    That is the problem here. If someone looks at this graph, they see that the sky is falling because the bars have increased so dramatically. On the left, your team has represented a 30% increase with a graphic that shows a 966% increase. On the right, your team has represented a 63% increase with a graphic that shows a 308% increase.

    And are the two sets bars related in any way? You might think so, given that they show up next to each other and are supposed to measure the same thing. But from a data perspective, they are not even remotely close to being right.

    It is possible to use graphs and numbers in such a way that is honest. That\’s an important part of transparency. So, I fixed your graph for you.

    You\’re welcome.

    UPDATE: In the comments section, James quickly identified the problem… the graph starts the y-axis at 1000 instead of 0. I double checked and it looks like he is spot on. Thanks!

    With that in mind, the graph is more of a rookie mistake than a conscious attempt to deceive. I\’ve edited my post to reflect that (I left my original comments in so everyone can see what a smart-ass I tend to be).

  • Michael Steele Invites Political Math To Washington DC

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5afhNBcdmg&hl=en&fs=1&]

    I\’m pretty excited, it should be fun.

    I\’ll keep as much as possible updated via Twitter (@PoliticalMath) and the blog.

  • The Obama Stimulus: Predictions vs. Reality

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJu0DgpiK8c&hl=en&fs=1&]

    In this video, I take a look at the economic predictions that President Obama made in February regarding the stimulus plan and how those predictions are corresponding to reality.

    The answer is: Not well.

    But first, some references.

    OK… now into the math. The chart that everyone is using does not have a corresponding table with hard number (at least no table that I could find), so I had to guess-timate what they were predicting the unemployment rates would be in May. I assumed that, because their graph divergence began immediately after the Q1, 2009 line, that that line represented the beginning of Q1 2009 (as opposed to the middle). So I estimated that the May would be just a shade before Q3, which is about the same place that Geoff put his May data.

    Based on that, I estimated the points on the line like so:

    Unemployment Rate Unemployed Population
    Predicted Unemployment without the Stimulus 8.7% 13,492,000
    Predicted Unemployment with the Stimulus 7.9% 12,251,000
    Actual Unemployment with the Stimulus 9.4% 14,511,000

    Now… here is the problem. In order to make our data symmetrical, we would have to have another row… a row called \”Actual Unemployment without the Stimulus\”. This, of course, is a row we cannot have because we sadly live in a space-time of collapsed quantum possibilities. We can never know what that row would hold.

    This is where I start getting a little less analytical and a little more irritated. The president\’s predictions have been shown to be completely off the mark… almost laughably so. And yet he acts as if he alone knows what would have happened if we hadn\’t passed the stimulus because he keeps making statements like \”we\’ve saved 150,000 jobs\”.

    It is clear that, if he is referring to the chart we were presented with above, such a claim is absurd. What the president is doing is ignoring the fact that his predictions in the past were horribly inaccurate and simply moving ahead with new predictions. The big difference is that his new predictions can\’t be judged against any set of objective reality. He is pitting the actual universe in which the stimulus bill passed against the imaginary universe in which it did not pass. Not surprisingly, the imaginary universe is worse that the real universe and the result is that the President is a hero for saving us from that imaginary universe.

    I am not a very anti-Obama person. Predicting the future is tricky business and I think his team should get some leeway on this.

    However…

    Their predictions were not just kinda wrong. They were horrifically, disasterously wrong. If President Obama is going to use statistics and charts to push nearly $800 billion in spending, I think we should be able to expect his numbers to at least kinda match the reality that comes out of his policies.

    At the very least, I\’d like to know how his team got those numbers. More importantly, I\’d like to know how they have changed their method of prediction. President Obama is fond of saying that we tried tax cuts and they didn\’t work, so we should try something else. In that same vein, his team tried predicting the effect of the stimulus and that didn\’t work. So I would like to know if they are using the same failed methods they used before or if they are doing something different.

  • A Little Recession Perspective

    Hat tip from Greg Mankiw for the pointer to Donald Marron\’s post on keeping the current economic downturn in perspective.

    Marron states:

    The economy would have to fall much, much further than economic forecasters expect for the losses to come anywhere near those experienced in the Great Depression.

    And then we get to see this graph, which is a fantastic way of trying to put things in perspective.

    \"six-downturns\"

    I try to keep this graph in my head whenever people talk about \”the worst economy since the Great Depression\” and especially when they talk about how crisis requires the government to spend enormous amounts of money.

    The difference between this economy and the economy of the Great Depression is nearly the difference between a day trip from New York City to Washington DC and a cross country trip from New York City to LA.

  • AP Apparently Dislikes Accurately Representing Abortion Violence

    I love the way Freddie introduced a post on abortion late last year. He titled it \”you know what we don\’t talk about enough? Abortion\”. 

    I kind of feel the same way about the level of discussion going on with it. I probably would never have mentioned it at all on this blog if it hadn\’t been for the incident on Sunday in which a man shot and killed Dr. George Tiller \”one of the nation\’s few providers of late-term abortions\”.

    In the fourth paragraph of the AP article, I came across this line:

    \”But the doctor\’s violent death was the latest in a string of shootings and bombings over two decades directed against abortion clinics doctors and staff.\” 

    After reading that, I decided to look into the statistics of abortion violence with a view toward perhaps creating a visualization about it.

    Sadly, there are few things more skewed than abortion violence statistics. I found this pdf on \”Abortion Violence and Disruption Statistics\” done by the National Abortion Federation and it is mainly propaganda dressed in numbers. But it looks like their numbers on shootings and bombings are verified by legal authorities, so I assume they are pretty accurate. 

    Let\’s use those statistics to deal with the \”string of shootings and bombings over two decades\” that the AP talks about. (In order to give the AP the benefit of the doubt, let\’s assume that all the \”Attemped Murders\” of abortion clinic staff involved shooting of some kind. )

    According to the NAF document above, this is that the \”string of shootings and bombings\” looked like over the last 15 years:

    \"AbortionStats4\"

    Did you know that this is the first abortion related murder since 1998?

    I didn\’t.

    I was under the impression from the AP that abortion killings were like school shootings… the kind of thing that we tragically see on an ongoing basis. (I thought about a graph comparing school violence to abortion violence, but it seemed kind of apples-to-organges to compare sociopathic, psychotic and suicidal teenagers to politically motivated terrorists.) 

    Given the actual data, the characterization of this incident as \”the latest in a string of shootings and bombings\” is deeply dishonest. It embeds into people\’s minds the idea that this is a very common tragedy, like school shootings, hurricanes or gang-related violence. In fact, until I looked at the data very recently, I was under exactly that impression. 

    It would be much more accurate to say something along the lines of:

    This incident has shattered an eight year lull in anti-abortion related shootings, an activity that spiked to record levels in the 90\’s.

    UPDATE: Upon re-reading my post I realized that it sounded very dry and unfeeling… very matter-of-fact… when I talked about the recent murder. I hope no one got the impression that I\’m wholly unphased by this crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. I hope that the fact that referred to crimes of violence against abortion clinics and the staff as acts of terrorism would indicate how I feel about the topic.

  • Searchable Data For Chrysler Dealerships

    OK… now anyone who wants to look at this is more than welcome to it. 

    This is an Excel file into which I\’ve managed to put all the information about the closed and open Chrysler dealerships. Because wordpress is stupid, I can\’t upload an excel document, so I had to rename it so that it is a Word document. Just download it and change the extension to \”.xls\” and you\’re set to go.

    Chrysler Dealers (Closed and Open) 

    There are four sheets to the file. Two sheets are the raw data as best I could translate it. The other two sheets are the data cleaned up a little bit to make it more readable. 

    WARNING: For anyone who hasn\’t worked with this kind of data before… data is ugly. Some stuff is missing, some things are misspelled, names are inconsistent and addresses haven\’t been parsed. This isn\’t meant to be the most perfect data source of all time. It\’s just a format for the data that can be more easily organized, sorted, parsed, and analyzed.

    So… go at it. From Excel, you should be able to export as a CSV (comma delimited), which is nice and fun to work with from a visualization point of view.

  • The Dealergate Post That Will Make No One Happy

    I noticed yesterday that a good number of people are getting worked up because it looks like a large number of the Chysler dealerships that are being closed are heavy Republican donors. (Michelle Malkin does her usual roundup here)

    I\’m taking the time to try to do something that still seems somewhat lacking… run an actual statistical analysis of the data. I\’ll post more when I get some real data, but I did want to put up a couple thoughts early on.

    Thought 1: Megan McArdle says that this is likely a red herring. She points out that \”Democratic and Republican dealers are unlikely to be found in the same place, and the rural counties that tend to be red are probably less profitable.  I would be less surprised to find out that the administration rescued specific donors from the hit list than to find that they deliberately closed Republican dealerships.\”

    If there was any behind the scenes work by the Obama administration, saving Obama dealerships seems more likely than spitefully killing Republican ones. And I think that we\’ve got a pretty big \”if\” there to begin with.

    Thought 2: All the skeptics to this story are pointing to Nate Silver\’s \”Car Dealerships are Republican (It\’s Called a Control Group, People)\”. Unfortunately for them, that post is a load of statistical garbage.

    Nate is trying to establish a baseline of Republican-to-Democratic donations against which he can judge the validity of the data coming from the closed dealerships. This is a laudable goal, but I get really frustrated when people use statistical or mathematical terms and they don\’t know what those terms mean. I\’m starting to understand that people on both sides of the isle use \”science-y\” or \”math-y\” words because it makes it look like they\’re using science and can therefore be trusted. That\’s exactly what is going on here.

    Nate\’s investigation does not a control group make for the following reasons:

    • There are really three categories here: Republican donor, Democratic donor, and not a donor. He doesn\’t even recognize that the last category might exist.
    • He don\’t make any distinction between Chrysler dealerships and other dealerships. Maybe Honda dealerships skew Republican and thereby mess up his \”control group\”. This is like testing a drug aimed at teenage girls and building a \”control group\” that includes toddlers, WWII veterans and 40-year-old soccer moms. His data is hopelessly polluted.
    • He assumes that everyone who owns a car dealership will list their occupation as car dealer (or some variant). Where I grew up, Hank Aaron owned a couple car dealerships, but I think it was unlikely he listed his occupation as \”car dealer\”. (If I got a business card from Hank Aaron, I would want it to say \”Hank Aaron – Awesomest Person in the World… and Barry Bonds Can Die in a Ditch\”). When it comes to towing, you don’t want to pay too much, but you also want to ensure that your car and your family are well taken care of. Before you decide what cheap towing company to call, take a look at Towingless pricing at towingless.com.

    Take your pick. I got more.

    Thought 3: That fact that Nate Silver\’s \”analysis\” is a load of crap doesn\’t make the other analysis better… it just makes him something of an ass for pretending that he\’s better than everyone else.

    Example 1: Dan Collins says:

    Statistics that are available suggest that Chrysler auto dealers donated 76% Republican and 24% Democratic.

    Looks like someone else didn\’t control for non-donating dealerships. (UPDATE: Dan Collins comments below that this statement was revised, although I still don\’t see anyone taking into account non-donors.)

    Example 2: Doug Ross has a post called \”Dealergate: Stats demonstrate that Chrysler Dealers likely shuttered on a partisan basis\”. Towards the bottom, he has a \”What Are The Odds\” section in which he notices that one company, RLJ-McLarty-Landers, has six Chrysler dealerships that were not closed and claims that:

    The approximate odds of such an occurrence can be calculated

    He then proceeds to \”calculate\” those odds based on the assumption that the dealerships were closed at random.

    His odds are meaningless. What is RLJ-McLarty-Landers happens to have remarkable market share? Or excellent customer service?

    To posit an imperfect analogy, it\’s like me being surprised when all the K-Marts in my area go out of business. So I do a statistical sampling of all local supermarkets and say \”Ah-ha! All the Wal-Marts in the area didn\’t go out of business… what are the odds of that?\” And then I calculate the odds out and claim that there are nefarious plans afoot. (I love that word… afoot. Afoot, afoot, afoot.)

    Thought 4: This smells like a conspiracy theory. I hate conspiracy theories. I lean toward believing that people, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, are good people who are trying to do what they think is right.

    On the other hand, if I had been editor at the Washington Post in the 70\’s, I probably would have told Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that they were acting like crazy people.

    I confess to a heavy skepticism. So I\’m running the data as carefully as I can and I\’ll post what I find. It might take a couple days, though.  I\’m not quite ready to quit my job to chase this story full time.

    If you\’re looking for what seems to be the best work on this so far, it\’s probably at the entertainingly named Chrysler Dealership Campaign Donation Information blog. Based off an extremely quick scan of the information, it looks like Joey Smith (the author) is trying to gather data in a meaningful way.

  • Dick Cheney and \”Hundreds of Thousands Of Lives\”

    I\’m currently watching two week old episodes of Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld on Hulu. If you like outrageous, off the wall humor in your news, you really can\’t do better than this show. While \”The Daily Show\” and \”The Colbert Report\” take familiar cable news concepts and parody them, Gutfeld completely deconstructs those concepts. If he wasn\’t so libertarian, media professors would call his show a work of surreal genius. The show may not be as consistently funny as some others, but it is far less safe… you never know where they\’re going to go and what they\’re going to say when they get there.

    Anyway… back to the numbers thing. They were talking about Dick Cheney\’s interview with Bob Schieffer in which Cheney (in Greg\’s words):

    …insisted that enhanced interrogation saved a crapload of lives. That\’s right, he said \’crapload\’.

    OK, he didn\’t, but he should have.

    They then show the part where Cheney stated that:

    \”I am convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives.\”

    Now I don\’t want to talk about the morality and ethics of enhanced interrogation, a topic about which I can\’t even begin to talk intelligently.

    But I do know a little something about numbers and I remember that, on 9/11 we were all terrified (or at least I was) when we heard how many people worked in the World Trade Center buildings. The number \”50,000\” was tossed around a good bit that morning. I was happily surprised when the final toll was drastically revised downward over the several weeks .

    Near as I can make it, the only way the Bush administration could have saved \”possibly hundreds of thousands\” of lives is if they stopped a nuclear attack in a major city. And I\’m going to go ahead and say that the burden of proof on them is pretty heavy for something like that.

    If you bust six guys drinking beer and talking about nuking LA, you probably didn\’t save that many people. If, however, you bust six guys drinking beer and talking about nuking LA… and they have a dozen gas centrifuges in the basement enriching uranium, they\’re still miles away from nuking LA, but at least you can make the case that you saved a crapload of lives by busting them.

    Take note, I\’m not at all against going after potential terrorists. I\’m just against using numbers so carelessly that they lose their meaning. The \”hundred thousand lives saved\” is, as Kevin Godlington stated on the show, lunacy.

    As a side note, Kevin Godlington is one of Red Eye\’s best contributors. He is a British veteran who provides remarkable insight on the show and also works with military charities to help British and American soldiers deal with combat stress. I\’ve had a couple people ask if they could donate to help my pro bono work here. If you\’ve ever thought of doing so, donate to Kevin\’s charity instead.