steve
Jan 31 2023 at 10:30am
Interesting, as I was thinking of adding to my list of poorly done studies to show our medical students. There is at best a retrospective association and there is no causal link. He goes to the trouble of comparing 3 groups, for-profit, non-profit and government, then omits the govt one in his analysis. That would be valid if this were a study with controls and some kinds of interventions and the study was designed to look at only those two groups and that was an incidental finding. However, this was just a retrospective review of statistics. Also, maybe I missed it since i did read this late at night, but the paper doesnt acknowledge that there is a body of literature suggesting that at baseline there are differences in care at non-profits and for-profits. So, for me and think most of us in medicine this is the kind of paper where we say this is kind of interesting but doesnt mean much and someone needs to do a real study if we want a real answer.
I was also shocked to find that the Aronson source he cited turned out to be a newspaper article. Having reviewed, formally and informally, quite a few papers to be published in medical journals that was surprising to me, but maybe its normal for economics journals.
Steve
