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Health Care Reform has been a major goal for the Obama
Presidency and the Democratic party. The year long push
against powerful forces and a fully opposed Republican
party finally came to a victory celebration with Obama
signing the health care bill into law on March 23, 2010.
From a Washington Post article:
The 15-foot-tall wooden doors behind the podium slid open
around 11:30 a.m., offering a glimpse down a long,
column-lined corridor of a portrait of President Bill
Clinton on a distant wall. Obama and Biden, each in a
navy-blue suit, white shirt and navy-blue tie, entered to
applause and chants of "Fired up, ready to go!" from
lawmakers, some of whom had questioned the president's
commitment, tactics and policy goals over the past year.
In his speech, Obama thanked the lawmakers for their
"historic leadership and uncommon courage" during a year of
fierce opposition, acknowledging that they had "taken their
lumps during this difficult debate."
"Yes, we did," shouted Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.),
drawing laughter from his colleagues with his play on
Obama's campaign slogan.
After a brief congratulatory speech, which named many who
had worked untiringly, and named also his several
predecessors who had tried mightily to reform the US health
care system, Obama put pen to paper (actually 22 pens), bringing to an
end many decades of efforts to improve how we do this most
personal and most urgent work.
The GCP event was set for 11:00 to 15:00 Washington time
(15:00-19:00 UTC), which includes half an hour before the
beginning of the ceremony, and 3 hours or so after the
signing. The actual signing was probably
around 11:45 plus or minus 15 minutes.
The result is Chisquare 14736 on 14400 df for Z=1.971 and
p=0.024.
Exploration: A reasonable question to ask, despite the small S/N ratio of
GCP data, is whether the health care reform issue shows up
most strongly in the data from eggs in the US. It is, as
have been other Obama-related events, of interest to many in the
rest of the world, but it affects US citizens most directly.
The answer to the question is a modestly persuasive no. The
effect for 20 US eggs is positive, but not as strong as when
the full network is used. This outcome may be an excellent
example of the fact that the effect size is too small for
reliable interpretation of individual events (or comparisons
of subsets or single Eggs. See also the note at the end of
this page.
Exploration: On the 25th of March, Dick Shoup emailed the suggestion
that the preceding Sunday should be an event: "... how about an
event at the time of the passage of the health care bill
in the House? TV coverage was extensive all that day (Sun
3/21)." He added, "It seemed to me that all day Sunday was a
long drawn-out emotional buildup
to the final vote, and lots of people were paying at least
peripheral attention throughout via tv or radio."
The formal event had already been set, but we proceeded with
an exploratory assessment of Dick's proposed event, and the
result is a striking vindication of his intuition.
Had this been an a priori prediction, the associated
probability would have been 0.001 (Z=3.115).
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical
effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from
noise. This means that every "success" might be largely
driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect
can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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