There recently has been a flurry of declarations by Democratic politicians, scholars, and pundits that the bill replacing of Obamacare is literally deadly. This is a pretty potent argument, and an especially shocking one, as it essentially accuses Republicans to willfully kill Americans.

I want to stop on one of these statements. In January, Sen. Bernie Sanders said on Twitter that the Obamacare replacement would kill 36,000 people. He was promptly rebuked by the Washington Post, which considered his declaration nonsensical, partially because the details of the Obamacare repeal law were not known at the time. Now that the bills are on the table, and given the additional similar declarations by other Democrats, I figured it would useful to re-check that claim today, and see if it is still worthy of a rebuttal.

In short, the overall direction of that statement may be true, but the number truly is baseless. There is no proper study to back up that precise number. Indeed, no study provided a precise answer as to how many deaths would result from a repeal law. Unsurprisingly, Democrats have put forward wildly different numbers than just 36,000.

The numbers put forward by Democrats are generally recycled from two health policy studies:

• The first one looks at how the mortality rate evolved in states that expanded Medicaid in the early 2000s vis-à-vis the ones who didn’t. They found that it saved one life for every 455 newly-insured people; extrapolating that to 20 million insurance losses, you find 44,000 deaths annually.
• The second one looks at how the rate evolved in Massachusetts after the passage of ‘Romneycare’, which was an Obamacare-like system in that state. They found that it saved one life for every 830 newly-insured adults. This translates to 24,000 or 36,000 deaths nationally if you estimate, respectively, that the law will make 20 or 30 million Americans lose health insurance.

The 36,000 number that Sanders quoted came probably from the conclusion of the second study, as well as an extrapolation based on 30 million health insurance losses. The Washington Post was right when asserting that Sanders couldn’t know how many people would lose health insurance because of the Obamacare repeal, indeed, he was off by 5 to 8 millions. So, even if we apply Sanders’ methodology to the death question, we would find something in the range of 30,000 people.

But even applying Sanders’ methodology is problematic. Translating these studies’ finding to an Obamacare repeal is not easy and amounts a little to compare apples to oranges. The obvious caveat is that the two studies are heavily local, especially in Massachusetts, which has much better care and much more wealth than other states. Therefore, it is unclear how much the results in one American region can be scaled to the entire country. More largely, it highlights a thorny problem when it comes to the evaluation of an Obamacare repeal: how many (healthy) people would happily choose to drop their insurance, how many would do it because they can’t afford it, and how many would do it because of both? This is rendered all the more complicated by the relative leakiness of the Obamacare mandate, which may mean that the healthy people who would drop health insurance after a repeal have already done it.

More notably, the repeal of Obamacare is not a full repeal. For instance, the bills keep the Obamacare structure, with its private healthcare markets, in place. They also change the distribution of the health insurance subsidies, potentially altering the composition of the Americans with health insurance. This mean that, even if we could estimate the numbers of lives spared by Obamacare, it is not possible to consider that it would be the numbers of lives taken by an Obamacare repeal.

In conclusion, the assertion that the Republican bills will kill people is essentially speculative, but it probably is right. It is overwhelmingly likely that, if Republicans are able to repeal and/or replace Obamacare, millions more people will be uninsured in the medium-run, and a lack of health insurance is correlated to mortality.

But to advance a precise number is unjustified. It is unclear how much the population that would forego health insurance would be particularly prone to getting sick. Moreover, the studies that have estimated how many lives were spared by the extension of health insurance in other contexts display varying numbers. Now, all these caveats only make the estimate less reliable. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the number is necessarily going to be smaller. However, the level of assertiveness of some Democrats with regard to these death estimates is simply not warranted.

It turns out the average MIT student doesn’t overload on courses as much as one might expect.

Spending time on campus or browsing MIT Confessions, however, might give you the wrong impression.

“I hear a lot of bragging… ‘Why would anyone take less than 48 units?’”

“I’m only taking 54 units this semester with no clubs or other obligations and I’m already finding it hard to keep up.”

I had a friend who took over 100 units in a semester. According to MIT standards, that’s equivalent to over 100 hours of work a week just on classes.

Yet, many of the most ambitious students at MIT have decided on a different path: take a small number of classes — 3 to 4 — and then push yourself to your limits in extracurriculars. This is similarly brag-able, but might yield better opportunities for one’s future than overloading on classes.

One successful alum, a professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, even proposes capping the number of classes an undergraduate can take. Guo never took more than 48 units in a semester himself.

The data is clear: it’s a myth that most MIT undergrads are taking over 5 classes and overloading on academics. It’s just not true.

“The median MIT student takes four classes per semester, which means most people walk around taking 48 units,” writes Danny B.D. ’15 on the MIT Admissions Blog.

A analysis I did for this blog post provides a rough estimate for the average number of classes: 5. As one might expect, this is larger than the median of 4 because both public discourse and the numbers are skewed by a few at the top.

But perhaps more convincing than the numbers are the testimonials of those who ventured into taking six or more classes themselves.

Holden Lee took 8 classes (18.101, 18.152, 18.705, 18.712, 18.725, 18.784, 18.901, and Chinese 3) in his sophomore year. After describing this experience on Quora, he writes: “I wouldn’t recommend taking so many classes under any circumstances. While I survived the semester fine, it was a process of gradual burnout.”

“I’d blocked out almost everything else that semester to focus on work, but found there are little voices in my head that don’t want to be ignored. I liked to write stories, and never had time to pursue it seriously. I thought about that poem, ‘Dream deferred.’”

Matt Hodel writes similarly of his experience taking 6 classes in a semester: “I’m a sophomore who took 6 classes last semester and failed miserably at pulling it off.” He describes falling into periods of depression throughout the semester.

His parting advice? “So I won’t say to never take 6 classes at MIT, or at college in general for that matter. Lots of people do it and many of them can handle it. Just think long and hard about how much you can handle and what your priorities are before making that decision.”

Those who do display more moderation in course loads have seen great results. In Danny’s blog post, Below 48, he describes how taking 3½ classes allowed him to pursue side projects he had been wanting to for a while, “breathe a bit more”, and spend more time with friends.

Guo, the professor who considered capping the number of units at MIT, thinks his taking few classes may have even increased his job opportunities. His employers never cared about how many classes he had taken. His resume only lists his GPA. By having more free time, Guo thinks students can develop “deep expertise” and work on research that will differentiate them from other students.

~~~

MIT doesn’t publicly release this information, or even the mean class size. They do, however, release a distribution of class sizes.

Fall 2015’s distribution is as follows:

I used this discrete distribution to estimate a continuous exponential distribution, which served as a decent model for the data.

I then wanted to find the number of student-classes (summing over the number of classes that each student takes). To do this, I computed the following integral with Wolfram Alpha:

Dividing the number of student-classes by students (~4500), we obtain an estimate for the average number of classes each student takes: 5.07.

I tried to listen to the livestream of Sean Spicer’s daily White House press briefing while simultaneously following and reporting the conversation on Twitter before, during and after the briefing. My Storify here.

For this week’s curation assignment, I created mine on Storify, link here: https://storify.com/aileen_h/not-just-us-the-world-is-falling-apart

A quick note on using Storify: Overall, I found Storify to be easy to use as long as I didn’t need anything other than what their tools strictly allowed. But, simple things like including an image were unnecessarily difficult or not supported. Its integration with Twitter also only supported recent tweets, which I had to find a work around to since I was including tweets from over a month back. The URL also couldn’t be manually updated, hence why the URL doesn’t tie with my actual story. I would only recommend Storify for breaking or recent news stories and curation.

Instead of going out there to source YouTube videos and Twitter posts, we decided to create a new tool to source content that helps people better understand others in all parts of the world.

Before online news and social media (yes, there was a ‘before’—weird right?) people stayed updated by reading print copies of local or national newspapers. The newspapers had editors who curated material and aimed to show a diversity of content. Readers would stumble upon whatever news stories were included.

Now, readers are able to seek out news. News websites personalize news for the particular readers. Many readers say they ‘get their news’ through social media sites. Personalization and social media lead to often-discussed ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’, e.g. exposing people to repeated articles carrying political views that align with their own.

Attempts have been made to make people care about global news. News editors often want to include more global news, but need to meet the demands of the readers. They are confronted to very tangible barriers, as simple as the language barrier. Global Voices is a site for citizen media reporting from 167 countries, co-founded by Ethan Zuckerman that aims at overcoming the language obstacle by providing translations.

There’s another problem. We argue that we should pay attention to what is happening elsewhere in the world, and particularly in countries that are socioeconomically and culturally different from our own. We also think that it is only by reaching out to people who are different and by trying to understand conflicting points of view that we will be able to foster a news ecosystem within which people can mutually understand one another. Initiatives to increase communication between people holding different political opinions have recently taken place, for example in the state of Washington. A group from a highly Democrat county simply drove down to the most Republican county of the State to have a face to face conversation with the people who voted exactly opposite of what they did. (https://theevergrey.com/took-10-hour-road-trip-cross-political-divide-heres-happened/)

We believe that these face to face interactions are important to create empathy and a deeper understanding of issues. However, face to face interactions are not always possible, for geographical reasons for example. Or simply because sometimes our circles of friends are people who share similar views and daily experiences. How might we encourage people to reach out to others in a way that encourages asking questions and listening? How might we engage all parties, so that rather than passively reading news about an event at a distant location, people are reaching out to those locations and asking questions?

We propose a new kind of community—one where community members answer any question that someone else has asked previously, and then contribute by asking a new question. Responses are submitted as videos, because, as we just stated, videos are human and induce empathy. Over time, the sequence of videos constitutes a tree, spanning responses from all around the world. This is the tree of global connection.

What might a tree of global connection look like? Well, we went ahead and created a prototype.

http://manyshades.herokuapp.com/.

Landing page

Submitting a video 

Okay, so taking aside some of the fluff:  We have a thing that lets people submit YouTube links and then displays them on a website.

We had fun making the website (aside: we had quite a laugh when writing “gray” with a green font), but the website now does not communicate the vision that we have articulated in this blog post. These are some steps to improve the website to better meet its purpose:

1. Certainly:  
   1. Instead of listing the videos one by one in a row, display the videos in a tree graph to show how questions and answers are connected.
   2. Determine a name, slogan, and symbol.
   3. Tag each video, enable browsing by tag, each tag having its own tree graph
   4. Miscellaneous:  Additional effort for users to upload video to YouTube; There’s no verification that users submit YouTube videos that they have personally uploaded; We’re currently using an MIT video for the banner; We’re using a heroku domain
2. Maybe:  Implement geolocation and a map view, and show the trail of the question-answer “ball” being passed around touching different areas of the world.

Further, while we tried to post a link to the website on Reddit and, we need to gauge interest from a wider audience and engage with people who might potentially use this tool.

In the end, to more properly reconnect our project to the assignment, we think this tool could be used for people to ask questions about world events they cannot witness in person, and that they have trouble understanding. Through these short videos, users could create question chains on all issues going around the world and create a deeper understanding of news events that can tend to be stripped from personality.

The tree layout would enable users to have an overall view on each issue, and to quickly find answers to the questions they are asking themselves and respond to what they feel they can add knowledge to.

— Katrine and Marie.