In the runup to the passage of last year’s tax reform bill, readers may recall, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers predicted that 10,000 people would die every year as a direct result of the bill’s passage. He had in mind the bill’s provision repealing the individual insurance mandate requiring people to have health insurance and forcing many to opt for Obamacare plans. “When people lose health insurance,” Summers explained on CNBC, “they’re less likely to get preventive care, they’re more likely to defer health care they need, and ultimately they’re more likely to die.”
It was a fine instance of what John O’Sullivan once called “galloping inferentialism”: If this happens, then that could happen, in which case something else might happen, and then—boom!—this other thing could happen. Summers defended his claim in the Washington Post by referring to a pair of academic studies purporting to link minuscule adjustments in mortality rates with increases in the numbers of people acquiring health insurance—as if an incomprehensibly complex array of factors couldn’t also account for slight changes in the death rate.
The habit of criticizing policies you don’t like by warning that they’ll kill people—thousands of people—has really taken off lately. Around the same time Summers predicted the tax bill would kill 10,000 a year, the Washington Post’s data blogger Christopher Ingraham claimed that a provision in that same legislation cutting the tax on alcohol would “cause 1,550 additional alcohol-related deaths each year.” Last year, similarly, when the GOP was poised partially to repeal Obamacare, Andrea Mitchell asked Bernie Sanders what would happen if the repeal bill passed. “Let’s be clear, Andrea—and this is not trying to be overly dramatic—thousands of people will die.”
Now we have a New York Times story headlined “Cost of New EPA Coal Rules: Up to 1,400 More Deaths a Year.” The piece claims that an EPA study “reveals” that the agency’s rollback of federal pollution regulations “could also lead to as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030.” Within minutes of the story’s posting, social media were aflutter with claims that the Trump administration is happy to kill 1,400 people a year.
Readers will not be surprised to learn that this is a highly tendentious interpretation of the EPA’s regulatory impact analysis, the relevant portions of which The Scrapbook dutifully read on a slow weekend afternoon. What we discovered is something other than an admission that this regulatory rollback will result in a body count of 1.4K. The report’s authors happily admit their methods of measuring pollution concentration levels are open to interpretation—the 1,400 number is informed guesswork. Also, the Times neglects to mention that these are 1,400 “premature deaths and illnesses.” More important is the simple point that every policy has costs as well as benefits. We could outlaw automobiles tomorrow and dramatically cut down on traffic fatalities—and, come to think of it, pollution!—but in that case even the Times would demand deregulation.
It’s all pretty depressing. But maybe our progressive brethren should look on the bright side: If their predictions are accurate, we’ll all be dead in a few years anyway, and there’ll be no more policies to argue about.
