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2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

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Rover said:
I'd say it needs to a) reduce the amount of uninsured, and b) reduce the historical growth rate of medical costs. These can be measured fairly easily.
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Next it is also tracked yearly how overall health care costs are trending. If costs stay around the GDP growth rate, Obamacare has been a success.
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This is almost exactly the same thing I am saying. If care improves so that we have a healthier, more productive population, then even if costs stay the same GDP will grow faster due to less illness. I have to couch it as "almost" though, because I still say that it's not sufficient just to reduce the growth rate of health care by any amount (0.000000001% reduction in growth rate is not enough). So long as the growth rate of health care costs outpaces GDP growth, the compounding will kill you in the long run.

So if, for example, health costs have been growing at 10% while GDP was growing at 3%, then bringing health growth to 9% and improving GDP to 4%, while better than what we had before, is clearly still not the long-term solution. Death by 10,000 cuts is a rather marginal improvement over death by 1,000....
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

FlagDUDE08 said:
If your hypothesis were true, we'd be hearing double the stories of Chicago gun violence from Old Pio... yet we aren't... I wonder why not...
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Well if you're expecting a balanced account for Old Pio, let me just advise you not to hold your breath. :D

Having said that, violence in St. Louis or New Orleans for example, is probably as bad as Chicago, the difference being there's much less people living in these cities.

Lynah,

I'll nuance it more and say if health care costs approximate the GDP rate, we're in good shape. So, if GDP is 3% and healthcare 3.1%, you know some knuckledragger is going on Fox saying how the whole thing is a failure, followed by every conservative poster out here picking up the very same theme (coincidentally, of course ;) ) the next day.

You can however spend a little more on healthcare if your costs elsewhere (defense spending, for example) are coming down. In fact gubmint spending is at the same level in real dollars as it was in 2008 IIRC, even though the economy has grown since then.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

walrus said:
Last I knew,Maine and North Dakota have the most guns per capita, where do they land, no where near the top?
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I don't know about Mainers, but NoDaks are just a bunch of nice guys, guns or no guns. They're even polite on the ice.

Now, the NoDak-on-Minnesotan murder rate is pretty high, but those are all justifiable homicides.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

walrus said:
Last I knew,Maine and North Dakota have the most guns per capita, where do they land, no where near the top?
Click to expand...

...and their urban neighbors with fewer guns per capita do have significantly lower gun violence.

Minnesota has the 8th lowest violence vs. North Dakota which is higher. While New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts all are among the five states with the lowest violence in the country...and well below Maine. Thanks for helping make the point.

http://www.deseretnews.com/top/1497/0/10-states-with-the-lowest-amount-of-gun-violence.html
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

5mn_Major said:
...and their urban neighbors with fewer guns per capita do have significantly lower gun violence.

Minnesota has the 8th lowest violence vs. North Dakota which is higher. While New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts all are among the five states with the lowest violence in the country...and well below Maine. Thanks for helping make the point.

http://www.deseretnews.com/top/1497/0/10-states-with-the-lowest-amount-of-gun-violence.html
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Shouldn't Maine be way higher as there are far more guns in Maine than the neighboring states?
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

5mn_Major said:
...and their urban neighbors with fewer guns per capita do have significantly lower gun violence.

Minnesota has the 8th lowest violence vs. North Dakota which is higher. While New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts all are among the five states with the lowest violence in the country...and well below Maine. Thanks for helping make the point.

http://www.deseretnews.com/top/1497/0/10-states-with-the-lowest-amount-of-gun-violence.html
Click to expand...

1. Overall firearm deaths in 2010
2. Overall firearm deaths from 2001 through 2010
3. Firearm homicides in 2010
4. Firearm suicides in 2010
5. Firearm homicides among women from 2001 through 2010
6. Firearm deaths among children ages 0 to 17, from 2001 through 2010
7. Law-enforcement agents feloniously killed with a firearm from 2002 through 2011
8. Aggravated assaults with a firearm in 2011
9. Crime-gun export rates in 2009
10. Percentage of crime guns with a short “time to crime” in 2009
Click to expand...

That's a lot of categories. I'd be most interested in seeing the individual and aggregated results of categories 1, 2, 3, 6, and perhaps 8. Seems to me that would eliminate a lot of ambiguity, and some inconsistent sample years.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

5mn_Major said:
...and their urban neighbors with fewer guns per capita do have significantly lower gun violence.

Minnesota has the 8th lowest violence vs. North Dakota which is higher. While New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts all are among the five states with the lowest violence in the country...and well below Maine. Thanks for helping make the point.

http://www.deseretnews.com/top/1497/0/10-states-with-the-lowest-amount-of-gun-violence.html
Click to expand...

Not every day you hear Minnesota described as an urban neighbor. :)
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

walrus said:
Shouldn't Maine be way higher as there are far more guns in Maine than the neighboring states?
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Not if you know your statistics. Additional guns and additional violence vs. 5 neighboring states. Its a statistically significant correlation.

It surprises me that Maine is more violent than New York where over 40% live in 'dangerous' NYC.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

John McCain is upset we don't have boots on the ground in Syria. His Right Arm Lindsey wishes it too.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

ScoobyDoo said:
John McCain is upset we don't have boots on the ground in Syria. His Right Arm Lindsey wishes it too.
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Not to mention they both still wish we were in Iraq. The lessons of history have clearly been lost on these guys.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

5mn_Major said:
Not if you know your statistics. Additional guns and additional violence vs. 5 neighboring states. Its a statistically significant correlation.

It surprises me that Maine is more violent than New York where over 40% live in 'dangerous' NYC.
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I once had a prof who said that statistics are like hookers, once you get them down you can do whatever you want with them. This report took their opinion (weak gun laws mean more gun violence) and made their stats fit that opinion. Ten minutes of reviewing their stats allowed me to show a different cause.

Lets look at the top ten states in firearm homicides compared to their ranking in African-American population (number of rank in parentheses).
1. LA (2)
2. MS (1)
3. AL (6)
4. MO (19)
5. MD (4)
6. DE (8)
7. SC (5)
8. TN (11)
9. GA (3)
10. AR (13)

Obviously, there is a direct correlation between high AA population and homicides therefore the problem is not weak gun laws but a higher AA population. QED

Now before you all start jumping up and down and screaming that I'm a racist, I don't actually believe that. Just trying to show how easy it is to take a premise, no matter how absurd, and make stats fit that premise. Of course, I sure that Center for American Progress is pure as the driven snow and has no hidden agenda behind their issuing said stats. :eek:
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

busterman62 said:
Now before you all start jumping up and down and screaming that I'm a racist, I don't actually believe that. Just trying to show how easy it is to take a premise, no matter how absurd, and make stats fit that premise. Of course, I sure that Center for American Progress is pure as the driven snow and has no hidden agenda behind their issuing said stats. :eek:
Click to expand...

Your point was that one can cherry pick...as that's what you (and Walrus) did. Let's look at the entire top ten and bottom ten married with the state policies rated by the law center to prevent gun violence. Still think there's a strong correlation with AAs? Six of ten states with top ten violence are in the west. Oh and I still think there's a strong correlation between gun violence and weak gun policy:

Bottom 10 states for gun violence
CA, 'A-' gun policies
CT, 'A-' gun policies
HI, 'B+' gun policies
IA, 'C-' gun policies
MA, 'B+' gun policies
ME, 'F' gun policies
MN, 'C' gun policies
NJ , 'A-' gun policies
NY, 'A-' gun policies
RI, 'B-' gun policies

Top ten states for gun violence
AK, 'F' gun policies
AL, 'D-' gun policies
AZ, 'F' gun policies (I'd call it 'F-')
LA, 'F' gun policies
MS, 'F' gun policies
MT, 'F' gun policies
NM, 'F' gun policies
NV, 'F' gun policies
WY, 'F' gun policies

I'm fine with gun ownership as its in the US Constitution. But don't give this BS that guns everywhere make society safer...
 
Re: 2nd Term Part VII: You May Like Your Doctor But You Can't Keep Her

5mn_Major said:
Your point was that one can cherry pick...as that's what you (and Walrus) did. Let's look at the entire top ten and bottom ten married with the state policies rated by the law center to prevent gun violence. Still think there's a strong correlation with AAs? Six of ten states with top ten violence are in the west. Oh and I still think there's a strong correlation between gun violence and weak gun policy:

Bottom 10 states for gun violence
CA, 'A-' gun policies
CT, 'A-' gun policies
HI, 'B+' gun policies
IA, 'C-' gun policies
MA, 'B+' gun policies
ME, 'F' gun policies
MN, 'C' gun policies
NJ , 'A-' gun policies
NY, 'A-' gun policies
RI, 'B-' gun policies

Top ten states for gun violence
AK, 'F' gun policies
AL, 'D-' gun policies
AZ, 'F' gun policies (I'd call it 'F-')
LA, 'F' gun policies
MS, 'F' gun policies
MT, 'F' gun policies
NM, 'F' gun policies
NV, 'F' gun policies
WY, 'F' gun policies

I'm fine with gun ownership as its in the US Constitution. But don't give this BS that guns everywhere make society safer...
Click to expand...

A more effective way to look at how guns have impacted murder and violent crime rates is to look at the various states that have changed sgnificantly within the past however many years, and then run regression analyses against them. Even better, because states like MN have had major changes in the conceal-carry laws, is to even look at a county-by-county basis. The reason for that is, like in MN, the change in the law was to make it a uniform process throughout the state where before it had been at the county sheriff's discretion and now it's not. County-based statistics will also help control for population density issues. You would also do well to even add in consdierations for changes in laws surrounding violent crimes, especially the punishment.

Simply put, you have certain states with loose gun control laws because they don't have much in the way of law enforcement agents, like Montana, where there's a county in the western half of the state bigger in size than many of the New England states, yet it only has a single sheriff and two deputies for all that land. Its gun policies are loose, but there's also not much in terms of people around to shoot at each other. Meanwhile, you have states like Illinois, where gun policy at the state level might not reflect what's happening in the urban areas like Chicago - which then has its own laws.

My senior thesis paper was on right-to-carry/concealed carry laws and their impact on murder rates. I learned at the end of my semester, after running numerous regression analyses, that murder rates were difficult to analyse at the state levels. I controlled for things like unemployment rates, labor force participation rates, population density, % change in GDP, and a slew of other factors, and even trying to control for ethnicity and race when the data would allow (figures obtained from the BLS). At the state level, for which I gathered all of my data, the only statistically significant impact on murder rates was the female labor force participation rates. This indicated that single-income families were on the rise, which led to worse or reduced parenting, which in turn led to higher crime rates. Beyond that - at the state level - all data was inconclusive. My data sets were from the years 1986 and 1996, the most recent data available at that time, and in between those years there were a number of states that changed their gun control laws; all data sets were taken from federal government resources.
 
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