Aaron wrote a post, “Anecdotes ain’t our thing. Stop asking.” in which he said it was important to him to “see the system work at a population level”. Okay, that got me thinking. Here is my comment.
I am curious what “see the system work at a population level” will mean? I am also curious when the Affordable Care Act will transform itself from a primarily political achievement into a policy driven achievement. Until then I would be suspicious of any population level data coming from the http://www.healthcare.gov. On one hand I agree with you that a steady diet of anecdotal stories is hazardous to your mental health. On the other hand I found that when I tried to explain differences between anecdotal information and some “population level” data sets found on healthcare.gov and coming from HHS, I found serious problems in either the data or the application used to access that data. As long as http://www.healthcare.gov is a politics driven web site it would be wise to remember the old saying, caveat emptor!
- As an example the insurance finder on healthcare.gov is an example of a population level data application that is seriously misleading for some people. Was it intentional or another silly healthcare.gov mistake?
- For the last month the Kaiser subsidy estimator was incorrect for me. It looks like the source of their problem was bad data from healthcare.gov(GIGO).
- I am still trying to figure out the burst of reports in September 2013 that showed that the 2014 Ohio rates will show a reduction compared to 2013 when all of my simple price checks are showing a 100% increase in rates? Maybe it is a coincidence but something has got to give. It is way past time that policy statements should start matching up with price checks.