I propose that congress adapt the "Richard Feynman-Rule".

[DetlefK]

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning particle-physicist. And perhaps his most famous quote is:
"Shut up and calculate."

Meaning: "Before indulging in endless speculations and predictions, how about first calculating whether your idea works?"


I hereby propose that any bill be published alongside the initial projections how it would perform.
Because I would really like to know what the hell made the GOP think that their AHCA is a good idea.

[Dr. Strange]

1. Surely You're Joking!

[Wounded Bear]

2. Measure twice, cut once...

put it in terms they can understand.

[dalton99a]

3. They'll use an alternative/non-scientific calculator

[Igel]

4. Doesn't quite work here, though.

Lots of hypotheses seemed to work, calculations or no.

And lots of things worked out differently from what the calculations said. You're only as good as your assumptions and logic. Note that the ACA made one set of predictions, even with substantial increased expenditures buried in the fine print. The ACA calculations turned out wrong. (More accurately, the assumptions they were based on were wrong, allowing us to say the calculations, unproven, must have been right. Untestable hypotheses are the best kind in politics. Better even than proven predictions. Negativity sells better than being right.)


Then again, are Feynman diagrams calculations? Because they get you through "calculations" that really couldn't be solved in the '60s. Neat trick, and reducible to the same processes, mathematically.

Personally, I like his view of cargo cult science. That's more suited to psychology, education, sociology, and, not so oddly, political science. "Set things up just like this and it's bound to bring in those planes!" And if it doesn't, blame the other party.

Keep wanting my students to read it, but I keep fearing having some hyper-PC person say that I'm racist and insulting cargo-cult members. (Can't just call fools fools unless the distribution of protected-class features are either randomly distributed among the general population or those you're calling fools simply are disproportionately not in a protected class. Because disparate impact.)

[gratuitous]

5. The ACA calculations did turn out wrong, but here's why

In the original Affordable Care Act, participation by the states in the Medicaid expansion was mandatory. Nobody really thought that states would turn down free money to provide health care for citizens, but the Democrats failed to reckon with the depths of Republican cruelty. The GOP went all the way to the Supreme Court to make the Medicaid expansion voluntary, and dozens of Republican-controlled states turned down the expansion and watched gleefully as their citizens got sicker and sicker.

In addition, Republicans also challenged the mandated benefits available in insurance plans, concocting a heretofore unknown right of corporations to practice religion that superseded the rights of their actual flesh-and-blood employees to have access to medical services that those corporations found religiously objectionable. In fact, nonprofit employers successfully objected to having to notify the government of their religious objection, because that would open the door for those same employees to seek alternative or supplemental insurance coverage that the employer objected to. Corporate religious practices are legally superior to citizens' right to health care.

I don't think either of those ridiculous and cruel outcomes could have entered anyone's calculations prospectively.