Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
It is of course very difficult to extract any precise numbers from a political discussion. :) However, if you click through some of the links in the article, or have a look at the followup from today, you'll find McArdle quoting predictions of tens of thousands of preventable deaths yearly from non-insured status. That looks to me like a pretty big hazard rate, no?
No. The Oracle says there're about 50 million Americans without health insurance. The predictions you quoted refer to 18,000 or 27,000 deaths for want of insurance per year. The higher number implies only a 0.054% death rate per year, or a 3.5% death rate over 65 years (Americans over 65 automatically get insurance). This is non-negligible but hardly huge (and potentially important for all ... (read more)