Counties in states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA saw a 25% decrease in drug arrests, a 19% drop in “violent offense” arrests, and a 24% decrease in “low-level” offense arrests (Simes & Jahn 2022). Expanding public benefits leads to lower crime rates!

Wow! In addition to the clear social benefits, has anyone calculated the economic impacts?

Are these relative to controls? It’s not clear here. If not, it’s barely worth noting.

But... but... according to our government the only effective way to fight crime is to give people longer and longer and worse and worse prison sentences at younger and younger ages! Those statistics are probably just made up by some cultural elite. Better trust common sense!

No way really??????

But if crime goes down and people get health care they need, how are Republicans going to scare voters into electing them?

remember y'all the whole reason walter white got into meth production was to pay for cancer treatment

@charlesgaba.bsky.social In case you haven't seen this.

how did the control group do

It's like there's some weird correlation between desperation and crime 🤔

I love this but also I have a statistics question: I feel like politically, states that expanded Medicaid are more likely to also legalize cannabis. Do the stats regarding drug offenses adjust for changing cannabis laws?