Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
It's powerful and insidious because there's just the right grain of truth there.
Insurance companies have been waging war on doctors, in the media and in contracts, for decades. Everyone knows that doctors in the US are liars that artificially inflate their billing. It stands to reason that they're inflating the coronavirus numbers because those claims don't get questioned, right?
Nevermind that the reason that doctors bill the way that they do is the framework set up by the insurance companies around the government's CMS guidelines. The contracts are written to make the doctors look bad in the patients' eyes, the media reports on the worst of the excesses to reinforce the belief, and the insurance companies reward the media handsomely with advertising dollars for serving their propaganda efforts.
Trump doesn't know why (you think he EVER looked at his doctor bills?), but he knows that people view doctors in that way. He also instinctively knows that all he has to do is activate confirmation bias to be persuasive.
A good example of confirmation bias in action. This is typical garbage data reporting from a major media outlet. Professionally, if someone claimed that the rallies were causal you'd hold them to a much higher evidentiary standard than this article presents.
But because the result is in the expected direction, you accept the result uncritically and pass it on. In an ideal world, the major media outlets would make reporters obtain at least a master's in a social science or hard science (and do the work, and put the work in an appendix online) before going anywhere near data reporting.
