MAHA Report
It is ony 76 pages, and I wonder what it says of any importance. I’ll tell you my bias: part of the rise of the proportion of our children who suffering from various health and mental health conditions may well be overdiagnosis resulting from systemic perverse incentives in the funding policies for special education that bring in more money per capita for children with disabilities, child welfare systems that pay more for foster care and foster care oversight for children with special needs, school-based nonprofit and for-profit mental health providers overdiagnosing and overmedicating children, SSI systems that displaced AFDC and TANF but require diagnoses for eligibility, and so forth.
Yes, those are biases, in that I am saying out front things that I suspect the supposedly brilliant MAHA report likely did not cover. And they are based on many years of teaching social welfare policy and reading student policy briefs which sometimes covered these very issues, along with periodical news analysis and investigative reporting on these issues. I do not have a lot of time for this right now, but I want, here on this beat, to use it to bookmark items that might inform my own read, starting with this WAPO expose of the use of AI by the “authors” of the report.