Affordable health care act is a hot topic in the country
either for political or technological reasons.
As a result, we find many articles and blogs in almost every publishing
medium expressing myriad of opinions on the same. In order to give credibility
to their articles, many of these authors have thrown in data, graphs and any
statistic they could lay their hands on without understanding relevance of the
data to their articles and if the data supports the theory presented in their
articles.
The article I am discussing today was on the coverage page
of Seattle times dated 16th Nov 2013 1 and is about age demographics
that is signing up for healthcare on Washington health exchange. This article
stirred my interest as it was not only on a hot topic but also was very
colorful with multiple charts, maps and data points. Being a keen student of statistics, I set out
on a mission to read, understand and analyze the data.
The author started the article with a conclusion that
younger people are not signing up for health care and majority of the new signees
are older people. He analyzed the numbers on Washington state health exchange website
and provided the following graphs to justify his statement. He further went on
to explain the story of a 27 year old young man who signed up for health care
and his reasons for the same.

The author also sprinkled in details about various plans and percentage of
people that signed up for these plans, number of signups by county, total
number of web visits, percentage of women who signed up for these plans, etc.
·
The data about various plans and percentage of
people that signed up is great, but it is not relevant to the article or its
conclusion.
·
The data about number of visitors to website
does not contain age groups of the visitors to help us analyze the age demographics.
·
The map indicates the King county had the most new
signups followed by Pierce and Snohomish counties. Even though this data is not
relevant to the article, I did a quick correlation analysis on the population
in these counties 3 against the number of new signups and found a
strong correlation (0.97) among them with Spokane county being an outlier.
Hence, the number of new signups is directly proportional to the population the
county.
County
|
Population(In 1000s)
|
Signups (In %)
|
King
|
1,950
|
25.1
|
Pierce
|
795
|
10.9
|
Snohomish
|
713
|
8.7
|
Spokane
|
471
|
10.2
|
Clark
|
425
|
6.5
|
|
Population
|
Signups
|
Population
|
1
|
|
Signups
|
0.975942
|
1
|
In conclusion, the article has colorful charts and good data
points. But, statistically it is inaccurate and presents a wrong picture of the
healthcare signups.
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