As much as it pains me to say, I had to scrap my original plan to
examine the impact of climate change on health outcomes (vector-
borne disease). I had a surprisingly difficult time finding a large enough
dataset (I had thought the WHO would have a longer timeseries on
health data than it did); I also had a hard time finding data on the
factors I wanted to consider, including presence of standing
water/days of consecutive precipitation, on a country-by-country
basis for the entire world, in a format I already know how to use. Most
of this data came in GIS-friendly formats, but that's a skill I don't (yet)
have.
Shifting gears, I went to the reliable US Census Bureau to think about
how I might rescope my project to still look at health, but with a much
stronger chance of finding robust data in formats I know how to use. I
decided to investigate the impact of the ACA/Medicaid expansion on a
variety of socioeconomic indicators, and to see if I can also extend my
analysis to cover COVID, and the impacts of the expansion on states'
ability to manage the pandemic. There is good data on COVID and
health outcomes more generally on the CDC website that I plan to use.
Conveniently, both the Census and CDC provide data on a county-
basis, and code counties the same way. I hope that will make merging
the data a bit easier. Although this is a pretty different problem than
the one I started with, it will still (hopefully) provide insight on the
value/merit of a large-scale policy intervention in the name of
improving living standards, which was my core interest. I have a good
number of questions to investigate; they may not all make it into the
project, but I think the data should provide insight in at least one of
those directions, which will then help me scope my work for the rest of
the class.
I look forward to learning about your projects, and to hearing your
feedback via discussions and during our various presentation
opportunities this term!
