From the abstract: "After additional adjustment for race/ethnicity, income, education, self- and physician-rated health status, body mass index, leisure exercise, smoking, and regular alcohol use"
> On the authors of the correlation study, who should never have studied this question without looking at extensive control variables or without more specifically studying causation?
How do you suggest studying causation in this setting? A randomized controlled trial where we deprive people of health insurance? Even that will likely not yield a true causal estimate, because randomization only helps for pre-randomization differences in the population, and behavior change from lacking health insurance will occur post randomization. The authors do extensively discuss their control variables, and important to remember is the fact that most papers only control for variables which ended up doing something, a subset of all variables that were tried. The NHANES data the study was pulled from includes a staggering number of covariates.
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While not an ironclad study, I found the paper itself vastly more compelling than the politifact analysis of it, which boils down to "Well, observational studies might be wrong because reasons".
