Response to “mortality and science: A comment on two articles on the effects of health insurance on mortality”

Kaestner (2021) asserts that the analysis of Miller, Johnson, and Wherry (2021) lacks statistical power to uncover mortality effects. However, the power calculations provided by Kaestner (2021) contain several implementation errors. Furthermore, Kaestner (2021) relies on implausible assumptions to interpret the results. In this response, we show that the analysis conducted in Miller, Johnson, and Wherry (2021) is well-powered to detect reasonably-sized effects once these errors are corrected and more realistic assumptions are used for interpretation.