to begin, there's no particular story behind my absence, I just didn't feel like paying any attention to Megan for a while. Cuz she's a fucking moron who has failed spectacularly to in any demonstrable way personally develop that refined inner self which religions inadequately refer to as a soul. Y'know, a movement conservative.
Plus sometimes the best way to irk a narcissist is to forget they exist.
Anyhow, I've been good, a bit lazy, but good. So let's do a 'traditional' semi-shorter, something light to ease back into things.
Why Warren's New Bankruptcy Study is So Bad:
...because Elizabeth Warren is not just ideologically opposed to Megan, she has facts and good reasoning to back it up. Further, as anyone who's ever seen her speak even for a few minutes in a documentary can tell you, Warren has the rare talent of being able to coherently explain complex issues relatively quickly without being simplistic or reductionist, which is part of why she's so successful and influential. In other words, Elizabeth Warren is, like Naomi Klein, the kind of person Megan has failed to become.
Also, Warren's study uses people being bankrupted by medical costs to show that medical costs are problematically high, the truth of which is totally negated by the fact that she's a poopyhead.
If we didn't have a useless executive class at the head of our medical 'industries' we wouldn't have 50,000 varieties of boner pills or mandatory nationwide prozac or hardcore anti-psychotics advertised on tv as anti-depressant supplements. But we would have significantly lower costs without their salaries and bonuses and corporate expenses, and more humanely directed research goals.
So Elizabeth Warren is a double poophead stinkosupreme.
Actually, this also works to summarize the post just prior, as well, tho in that earlier post Megan also manages to suggest maybe some of the people bankrupted by medical bills are just dumb or something.
Oh, and there's this;
My radar is further engaged by the fact that they're implying a really astonishing surge in medical-bill-driven bankruptcies, in a healthcare environment that just didn't change all that massively.Nope, spiking unemployment and the credit markets drying up wouldn't have any impact there, like loss of insurance or inability to get a new credit card to park a debt on. Fucking brilliant, Megan.
And that's enough for a first dive back in. Weekend!
Added:
Holy fuck she's stupid. While trying to argue against a study that claims the percent of bankruptcies due to medical costs has gone up, Megan says this, (from the second post linked);
What's left out here? That in 2001, 1.45 million households filed for bankruptcy. In 2007, that number was 727,167. Had their paper done the basic arithmetic, readers would easily have seen that their own numbers imply a decrease in medical bankruptcies, from about 750,000 to slightly over 500,000. Yet their paper does not merely ignore this fact; it uses language that seems deliberately designed to conceal it. I invite any of my readers to scan the paper for any hint that medical bankruptcies had fallen significantly over 6 years.She even acknowledges the existence of the 2005 law making it much harder for individuals to file bankruptcy, dropping the totals.
Wow. Girls aren't bad at math, but Megan is.
One more add-on:
After yet another commenter takes Megan to task for the obvious mistake I mentioned above, and her failure to in any effective way defend that mistake in the second post (or first linked to here), and she has a little back and forth with him, comes this (beginning with the end of the rational commenter's last response);
Instead of ranting about what terrible economists they all are, perhaps you could have made a well sourced argument as to why the more likely explanation for the increased proportion was the causes you mention? Just a thought.Now that's just plain old funny.
Reply
Megan McArdle (Replying to: J.W. Hamner) June 5, 2009 11:34 AM
There are no sources. We don't know. I just got done writing a whole post on how we don't know why they fell. None of the experts I've talked to know why they fell. It's the central mystery of bankruptcy expertise, and Warren et al. just declare that they've solved it.
Posts
5 comments:
Tangentially OT, but I didn't know that about Abilify. Thanks for the mention. What next? Thorazine for Restless Leg Syndrome?
If Megan doesn't know, then no one knows.
That post and the one before it (especially) are absolutely incredible. Didn't she read the report? Did she not understand it? How on God's green earth can you get something so wrong? How can you be so wrong so often and not get fired? Not for being wrong, mind you, but for being really bad at hiding it?
I truly can't believe this.
Susan,
There are at least a dozen "how can she [insert journalistic failings here] so often and not get fired?" when it comes to McMegan. Spelling, grammar, pretentious, god-awful writing, heavy thesaurus dependecy, simple factual errors, writing on subjects she knows nothing about, refusing to do even the simplest and quickest of research, boastful elitism, insecurities leading to her need to prove she's better than everyone else, vanity, self-centered ignorance, over-estimation of personal talents and intellegence, arrongant, presumptuous, narrow-minded, judgemental, personal experiences as anecdotes in place of statistics, facts and a larger reality that differs from her own, failure to note conflicts of interest or mention that she stands to make money off of the sale of things she hawks via Amazon, using personal pronouns and surnames only when speaking about others for an entire article, using economics terms without explaining them to her readers...and I can still go on...
Someone once asked in her comments if journalists really needed actual training, as if it's a job a monkey could do. The irony of that question being asked at her site is delicious. And the answer is YES, as McArdle illustrates every single day.
Oh, but NT, she's talked to EXPERTS! So many of them, in fact, that it would be too tedious to name them all.
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