Krystal Ball: Washington Post "fact check" proves Bernie right

[ehrnst]

119. Your very educated opinion doesn't outweigh this groups' collective very educated opinion

Policymakers’ beliefs about the frequency of medical bankruptcies are based primarily on two high-profile articles that claim that medical events cause approximately 60% of all bankruptcies in the United States. In these studies, people who had gone bankrupt were asked whether they’d experienced health-related financial stress such as substantial medical bills or income loss due to illness. People were also asked whether they went bankrupt due to medical bills. People who reported any of these events were described as having experienced a medical bankruptcy. This approach assumes that whenever a person who reports having substantial medical bills experiences a bankruptcy, the bankruptcy was caused by the medical debt. The fact that, according to a 2014 report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, about 20% of Americans have substantial medical debt yet in a given year less than 1% of Americans file for personal bankruptcy suggests that this assumption is problematic. Clearly, many people face medical debt but do not go bankrupt. Even after correcting for overly broad definitions of “medical” expenses, the existing, widely cited evidence on medical bankruptcy is built on the fallacy that when two things occur together there is necessarily a causal relationship between them.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5865642/

Also there is math:

That 500,000, which was then increased to 530,000, is people, not bankruptcies, which includes family members of the person who declared bankruptcy.

At 2.3 people per family unit, that translates to between 217,000 - 230,000 bankruptcies. Less than half the purported 500,000 - 530,000.

That's not to say that it still isn't a huge problem. It's just that Sanders got his numbers wrong, and he's angry about being fact checked, and people are calling it an attack on the whole notion of medical debt being a huge issue. That's like the gun nuts saying that any regulation = BANNING.

If NRA was to make that kind of error representing the data when talking about the crimes stopped by "good guys with guns" we would rightly be calling that out.

I'm sorry if that "attack" of factual backup hurt in any way.