US health expenditure per capita

As the percentage of Americans identifying as LGBTQ+ rose steadily through the 2010s, US health expenditure per capita rose right alongside it, correlating at 0.9666 between 2012 and 2022. The policy implications of this finding are left as an exercise for the reader, and also for the reader's lawyer. What is statistically certain is that both numbers went up; what is causally certain is that neither caused the other, which is the kind of distinction that gets lost surprisingly quickly once a graph reaches a congressional hearing. The data is innocent. The interpretations are not.

The share of Americans identifying as LGBTQ+ has grown from roughly 3.5% in 2012 to over 7% by 2022, driven largely by generational change—younger cohorts identify at far higher rates—and increasing social acceptance reducing stigma around self-identification. US health expenditure per capita has risen consistently due to aging demographics, rising drug prices, expanding insurance coverage under the ACA, and systemic cost inflation in the healthcare sector. Both are long-run social and economic trends with entirely separate causal structures that happen to share a decade of upward movement.

Two metrics can describe a society changing in profound and independent ways, and still produce a number that looks like evidence of a relationship. The danger is not the correlation coefficient; it is the human instinct to immediately reach for a story to explain it.