Huff Post ran defense for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson after it was revealed she got a key statistic wrong in her dissent after the top court ruled against affirmative action in higher education.
The Daily Signal reported Jackson citied a statistic from a study that was "factually incorrect in describing the results of a study that should not be believed, which wouldn’t provide practical support for her argument even if it were accurate and credible."
The error? She wrote in her distenting opinion that, "For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die." The claim was from an amicus brief filed by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which was referencing a study that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
The study does not claim to find a doubling in survival rates for black newborns who have a black attending doctor. Instead, in its most fully specified model, it reports that 99.6839% of black babies born with a black attending physician survived compared with 99.5549% of black babies born with white attending physicians, a difference of 0.129%.
HuffPost decided to run the "fake but accurate" defense to say Jackson's broader point about healthcare was correct.
Lots of right wing chortling over a statistic Ketanji Brown Jackson got wrong in her opinion
— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) July 6, 2023
But when it comes to her broader point, about what research says on race and health care, she got it right — and Clarence Thomas didn’t https://t.co/DT8aT55vGm
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"That doesn’t excuse the mistake. It also doesn’t mean her broader point is wrong. There’s a lot of research about race and its role in health disparities, and the overwhelming consensus is that race absolutely matters, for precisely the reasons Jackson suggest," Senior National Reporter Jonathan Cohn wrote.
Cohn went as far as to say it was Justice Clarence Thomas who got it wrong on when it comes to race and how it is impacted in healthcare:
Thomas didn’t dispute that such differences exist. But, he stated, “None of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race—rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor—and individual outcomes,” Thomas wrote.
This would come as a shock to the researchers who have studied racial disparities in health and gone way out of their way to adjust for factors like income, education or predispositions to certain medical conditions. Over and over again, they’ve found race still matters.
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