30 is the new 40? Not how the saying is supposed to go, but that is an apt description of America's #population #health challenges. The share of working age adults from the 1971-1975 birth cohort reporting excellent health at age 30 = share from 1991-1995 cohort reporting same at age 40.

Ok this made me literally lol But in truth VA outperforms private sector in terms of wait times jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Does anyone have a copy of the NSDUH State Prevalence Table for 2019-2020?

Raccoon jackpot

This graph never fails to be shocking: "The US has experienced the earliest and greatest slowdown in life expectancy improvements among higher-income countries, reported Eileen Crimmins. “We have horrible life expectancy—and it’s getting worse and worse”" www.prb.org/resources/se...

Once upon a time, @hollygodarkly.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy & I did a podcast about a ten-novel epic series where -- I am not kidding -- "dying of the weather on top of Mount Washington" was plan B in case the initial murder attempt didn't work. Nerds know not to go on that mountain unprepared.

If this ever happens to me, let me die and then lie about how it happened to save my ghost the embarrassment abcnews.go.com/US/mount-was...

America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy www.yahoo.com/news/article...

The ACA did lead to increased individual health insurance premiums in 2014. That was because insurance before that generally didn’t cover pre-existing conditions or benefits like maternity care, and it had lifetime and annual limits on how much it would pay.

This is the most accurate depiction of the Midwest to date. Wichita has always felt like the last Midwest city while also being the first plains city.

I'm having an incredibly hard time publishing a paper, and I can't help but think it's because it upsets the political opinions of medical researchers. The level of methodological nitpicking exceeds anything I've encountered previously.

We just spent 6 months to add 1 figure to this paper. Some people said, "Couples aren't prioritizing men's careers. Men just have better earnings opportunities when moving." Earnings effects of moves for couples on the left, singles on the right. Negligible gap between single men and women.

Approximately .05% of U.S. CO2 emissions per year. Is JAMA just publishing work showing medical care has environmental costs now? Were medical reviewers even equipped to assess their methods? jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

So much for the Hatch Act

So much for the Hatch Act

Laughing and crying as I write that I only spend 5% effort on research administration on my annual faculty effort disclosure

🧵

I think that, as a field, we have fundamentally failed to teach our people (students, MDs, PhDs) to recognize the difference between (a) a confounder and (b) anything remotely associated with the outcome of interest Evidence: Any referee report I've received

Launch day 🚀 We’ve just released @chartlecc.bsky.social - a daily chart game! Your job is to guess which country is represented by the red line in today's chart. You get 5 tries, no other clues! Play today, come back tomorrow for a different chart with new data and share with your chart friends 📈

also

The core inflation rate increased for the fourth straight month. Annual rates: 1 month: 4.2% 3 months: 3.6% 6 months: 2.7% 12 months: 3.1%

Do your mental health a favor and turn this on for today. You really don't want to watch this. It is awful.

❗❗❗NEW RESEARCH ALERT ❗❗❗ With @beniwalsukriti.bsky.social and @salpykanimian.bsky.social we examine the impact of states converting from Healthcare.Gov to #StateBasedMarketplaces after 2018 in the #ACA journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... TLDR: No detectable effects #HealthPolicy 1/7

In 2023, the U.S. spent an average of $13,432 per person on health care — nearly twice the average amount spent by comparable countries ($7,393 per person). Explore the comparisons: https://on.kff.org/4gdrfmD

The best part of household surveying is we get to meet the cats

I am fascinated by this guy who was a Higher Ed administrator and has now moved into teaching classes as a faculty member. He is documenting his whole journey on TikTok. Over the summer, he had so much excitement 🧵

Sharing some encouraging news re: CDC PRAMS. The CDC has indicated they will weight and clean the 2024 PRAMS data. Also, the PRAMS data collection system (PIDS) is up and running again and some sites have begun 2025 PRAMS data collection. Hopefully restoration of the ARF portal is coming soon too.

"The findings do not support the typical rationale for allowing barriers or costs to enrollment—namely, that they efficiently discourage participation by those who do not need or value the benefits."

Important findings on administrative burdens and Medicaid by Rebecca Myerson, Allison Espeseth, and Laura Dague @lauradague.bsky.social www.nber.org/papers/w34191

VA is so confident its employees are happy, they canceled the (legally mandated) annual satisfaction survey www.militarytimes.com/veterans/202...

Peer reviewers: I know you've run 293 sensitivity analyses, but maybe this 294th will change things

Normalize honking at Uber drivers who stop in the middle of the street

File under: physicians also respond to payment incentives The % of hernias recorded as >3 cm increased by 12.9% when CMS started paying more for them jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

A $1B shakedown of UCLA. Columbia and Harvard weren't the end; they were the beginning.

"GPT-5 has PhD-level capabilities"

RFK has announced that he is developing a vaccine against all viruses. Yes, every single one. The whole, uh, "phylum"

Fewer than half of patients pay their cost sharing for US hospitals jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Paper drop, for anyone interested in #metascience, #statistics, or #metaanalysis! @clintin.bsky.social and I show in a new paper in JASA that the P-curve, a popular forensic meta-analysis method, has deeply undesirable statistical properties. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/?

It was only a matter of time before the 1st case report of chatGPT-mediated medical harm was published. I have had patients say strange things to me in clinic that further questioning revealed were a result of asking chatGPT, but thankfully nothing harmful (yes I’ve already texted it to chubbyemu)

After asking ChatGPT what to eat instead of salt, a man slowly poisoned himself over course of 3 months and gave himself a psychiatric illness that was common in the 19th century, according to a new medical case study: www.404media.co/guy-gives-hi...

"I find that upstream steel tariffs have highly persistent negative impacts on downstream industry exports, production, and employment." coxlydia.com/papers/cox_s...

Look at the long term negative effects of President Bush's steel tariffs on employment (left panel). The tariffs were in place between the two dashed vertical lines. However, the negative employment effects lasted long afterward.

Has anyone used restricted NSDUH files and willing to chat about the request process?

The MISSION Act of 2018 was associated with reduced travel time to cardiovascular procedures for veterans living far from VA hospitals, reduced likelihood of choosing VA, but also associated with higher risk of adverse procedural outcomes jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

80 years later, a Holocaust survivor meets an American soldier who helped free him www.npr.org/2025/06/30/n...