There has long been a wide gap between the conservative view of “the insurance I want” versus “the insurance I want you to have.” You would think that some of the “free market” bastions in American media would institute “message-appropriate” forms of health insurance for their own employees, but you would be wrong. I have made several inquiries regarding the… Read more »
The slow-roll collapse of the ill-advised Iowa Medicaid privatization, which was put in place by former Governor Terry Branstad, continues under his successor, Kim Reynolds, to harm the lives of real Iowa citizens with disabilities and chronic medical conditions. Because of that fiasco, I thought it would be useful to dispel some widely-held myths about government privatization efforts in general…. Read more »
How “normal” are you in terms of interacting with the culture around you? A continuing theme of this blog is that we can view a lot of medical and social problems as various aggregations of “probabilistic randomness.” That is, many conditions in nature at least appear to occur randomly, but with predictable patterns to that randomness. And when you see a… Read more »
A very significant U. S. Army study on suicides in the ranks [see note 1] came and went past most public notice in 2013. On some military bases, “successful” suicides are nearly zero. Suicides on U.S. bases in South Korea have been very rare. But the rates are disturbingly high at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and Fort Hood, Texas, for example…. Read more »
In my earlier post on “The gun violence lottery” I presented the math behind my contention that the rise of American gun violence is mostly correlated simply with the accelerating rise in the availability of guns in America. The short version of the proof is found in the “should be obvious” fact that other “first world” countries have all of… Read more »
Vox.com’s Sarah Kliff has been mounting an excellent campaign to make hospital emergency room charges more transparent. One example making the rounds is several accounts of short ambulance rides being billed in the vicinity of $2000. I have yet to see a good discussion of this rate level presented as the very basic math problem that is the “Fixed-cost Dilemma.”… Read more »
Said no one at any funeral ever: “I figured out the probability for why he died.” [1] Part Two and Part Three of this series of posts looked why the statistics for cancer, automobile accidents and other unfortunate life events are often so rigidly probabilistic in narrow ranges in aggregate. In other words, we can often predict “How many?” down… Read more »
Part One of this series of posts introduced the idea that natural probabilities for life events like a cancer diagnosis or a traffic accident are counter-intuitively very predictable in the aggregate, although usually not individually. Part Two demonstrated how a low-probability and very skewed random event begins, after a lot of time and repetitions, to look very “normal” because of… Read more »
In Part One of this series, I suggested that you imagine what happens when a wonky die is rolled over and over again. Cancer probabilities are kind of wonky this way, with a low probability of happening, followed by an unpredictable course when it kicks in, possibly including death. The mathematical principle illustrated here is called the Central Limit Theorem…. Read more »
I have posted recently about the lotteries that you will likely lose and the lotteries you have already won. In this post I want to talk about the math of a lottery you might win, but really do not want to. And understanding the math here is to get to a closer understanding of probability and fate in nature. Every… Read more »