Are lawmakers getting the full picture? Concerns raised about Capitol health research

Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

I have followed and written pretty extensively on how a group tied to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science is funding a group of four “legislative fellows” with the stated intent of providing nonpartisan, unbiased scientific information to legislators. See “Related” below if you want to read that op ed.

I recently had a chance to sit down to discuss this work with Jon Caldara on an episode of Devil’s Advocate. That video is linked first below.

Embedding people in the legislature with outside funding is concerning, but concerns don’t automatically equal problems. I mentioned in the video that the public work I’d seen from the fellows seemed pretty benign.

Taping with Mr. Caldara inspired me to go back into the legislative publications page and give their work another look. Most of what I saw was still pretty benign, but a few cracks appeared in publications about public health.

There were a couple reports (linked second and third below) in the public health section that I felt demonstrate a lack of balance, a lack of completeness—something I hope does not continue.

The report linked second below is on the Social Determinants of Health. If you have not heard the term before, the CDC’s definition (cited in the report) is a pretty approachable one:

“Social determinants of health (SDOH) are the nonmedical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, worship, and age. These conditions include a wide set of forces and systems that shape daily life such as economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies, and political systems.”

The concept is not an entirely new or bad one; people had been coming to live in Colorado for decades since our climate helped ease their tuberculosis symptoms. What made the report noteworthy, then, was less the content than what was missing.

From top to bottom, there is zero mention of personal choices, including where those choices would overlap with other factors mentioned by the CDC above. E.g. if you spend a lot on alcohol, you have less to spend on housing and are apt to suffer more from a whole host of conditions because of it. Despite this connection, it’s missing. I was also unable to find any sort of corresponding paper on the effects of personal choice on health.

For both this report and the one I’m about to discuss, I wrote to the author (Legislative Fellow Lattof) and the director of the Fellows Legislative Council Staff Director Elizabeth Burger to ask some questions.

To save space I will attach the questions and responses as pictures. With regard to the paper on Social Determinants of Health, you will find questions and answers attached as screenshot 1. The questions are in boldface while the responses are in regular type.

Clearly for the Legislative Fellows and Legislative Council Staff, there is room for an exploration of social determinants of health, but not for personal choices—either in the same paper or on its own. I can’t help but feel that this focus is (intended or not) playing directly to those that feel that societal factors are the largest, or perhaps sole, determinants of one’s outcomes in life, a conviction that all too often runs with the related thought that it’s the government’s job to step in and fix said conditions.

The second link below is a little more technical in its flaw. Stay with me: it’s subtle but important and, as above, relates to an absence of something.

I have written in the past about “cargo cult science”, things that appear to be science but aren’t. In policy circles, this fiction is particularly pernicious because it gets used (erroneously) to justify laws and regulations that erode personal freedoms. This research is falsely lifted into the realm of establishing a causal connection, when this is decidedly not something you can conclude from the actual research.

The report linked third below details the hierarchy of evidence in health research. That is, the author does a review of the different kinds of studies and evidence used to inform healthcare and policy choices, listing the relatives strengths and weaknesses of each.

Problem is, in her report, she fails to mention a critical detail about what are called “quasi-experimental” studies, the kinds of “experiments” where (for a variety of reasons) you do not have a control group to compare with, so you make your own.

Even a cursory knowledge of the scientific process ought to make readily apparent how fraught with problems this is, not the least of which is the answer to the questions: “who gets to pick?” and “if I change the control group, does the outcome change?”

There was no mention of these problems, nor the fact that this type of research is not valid to establish a causal link between variables.

In the same email I referenced sending above, I also asked about this. The questions (boldface type) along with the response (plain type) are attached as screenshot 2.

NOTE: I often use “pseudo-experimental” not because I am unaware of the word’s meaning, but because I am. That is an intentional choice; these are fake experiments.

SECOND NOTE: Yes, experimenters do choose control groups for experiments. They choose how to set them up. The difference between a regular experiment, say, for a new drug might be that you divide people randomly into control and test conditions, whereas in a pseudo-experiment you get to pick among an existing population and choose who to include. The canonical example is an incredibly faulty gun control study which cobbled together a “control” group from several states.

Leaving this out may seem a quibble, but it is fundamental to understanding the relative strength of research. To a novice, to someone not familiar with what they are, it’s all too easy to conflate pseudo-experiments with actual experiments. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the gun control experiment I reference above getting tossed into policy discussions to justify policy, with the user talking about the research as if it were definitive proof of gun control’s efficacy. It’s not. It cannot be. It is not causal proof.

This should have been explicitly mentioned to legislators by someone who is supposed to act as a guide to the world of science.

The whole theory behind the legislative fellows was that they were there to fill in the gaps between those that were experts in technical fields and the legislators who aren’t experts in every technical field. My concerns about this whole thing have always centered on just how exactly they will fill that gap.

Initially the public-facing reports were relatively mundane and not concerning. Seeing things like I noticed in the reports I link to at bottom give me pause.

All the more so when you note that the Fellows are also working with legislators individually and we have no ability to see or assess what that looks like.

https://content.leg.colorado.gov/publications/social-determinants-health

https://content.leg.colorado.gov/publications/understanding-hierarchy-evidence-framework-health-research

Related:

My Complete op ed on the Legislative Fellows. This has links back to the series I did in my newsletter on them if you want more context.

https://completecolorado.com/2026/01/21/progressive-nonprofit-fellows-colorado-legislature/

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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