SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
In the years after health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act unfurled in Multnomah County, Oregon, cardiac arrests among those newly covered fell 17 percent, researchers report this week in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
The pilot study, led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University and the Heart Institute of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, is just an observational study—it can't determine causation—and it only looked at the one county. But, the authors argue, the data begs for follow-up.
[...] The correlation doesn't mean that the insurance coverage caused the change, the authors stress. And even if it did, it's not clear from the data how insurance affected cardiac arrest rates. It's possible that with improved diagnoses and preventative care, heart health could improve in this age range. Interventions like smoking cessation programs and medications for cholesterol and atherosclerosis could all improve health, the authors speculate. But more and larger studies are needed to determine if this is true.
Ars Technica coverage: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/06/after-aca-arrived-in-an-oregon-county-there-was-a-17-drop-in-cardiac-arrest/
The study in question: http://jaha.ahajournals.org/content/6/7/e005667
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday June 30 2017, @05:22PM (4 children)
A science denier who doesn't know what the word "hypothesis" means...
Nobody could've seen that one coming!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @05:40PM (3 children)
What in the world are you talking about?
These words are all mixed together but usually a theory is some explanation of what is going on, whereas a specific model is deduced from that theory. A hypothesis is a prediction that the values of some model parameter will be in a certain range (also deduced from the theory).
Anyway, good luck with your psuedoscience of vague predictions about stuff that already was observed (we hypothesis the same thing will happen again!)...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @06:11PM (2 children)
So where do the theories originally come from?
What good is a hypothesis that is not even consistent with past evidence?
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=20180&commentsort=0&mode=threadtos&threshold=0&highlightthresh=-1&page=1&cid=529487#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @06:22PM (1 child)
Theories are *explanations* abduced from observation... There is no explanation of anything behind this meaningless "hypothesis". All they do is restate what they already observed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @08:15PM
No, they state what they observed then hypothesized that the expansion of health insurance will "reduce the incidence of sudden cardiac death".
If they wished to test this hypothesis, then they would experimentally alter the health insurance coverage of a population or do an observational study of other areas. An unchanged or increased incidence of sudden cardiac death after the expansion of health insurance in other regions would count as evidence against the hypothesis.