Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
Believing in the power of evidence and reasoned argument to overcome greed, vested interests, and prejudice and shape the future, here's Harold Pollack: Some of the best and worst health policy coverage in America—and in the same newspaper:
The Wall Street Journal news section is an essential information source for anyone seriously interested in health policy…. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal op-ed section regularly include disgracefully misleading accounts of health policy…. Consider yesterday’s op-ed essay by Heather Higgins and Hadley Heath: “Informed Independents Cool to ObamaCare.”…
Independent Women’s Voice, an educational advocacy organization that runs the Repeal Pledge calling for the elimination of ObamaCare, believes that opinions about health care can be changed. When people’s views are based on faulty or incomplete information, IWV has had great success in changing those views by offering solid information. Over one week in mid-September, IWV conducted a message test among independent voters in 24,000 households spread over four states. The goal was to see if simply providing the facts about the true costs of the health law would affect popular support. Would independents, once they were educated about little-known but very real aspects of ObamaCare’s popular elements, change their minds about those elements? Would their support overall for repeal increase?…
Just what was the “solid information” that changed people’s views? A strange laundry list of obviously incomplete, untrue, or misleading claims from a website called healthreformquestions.com…. "The average family’s health-insurance premiums are already up $1,300." Readers who track through the references to a Kaiser Foundation report will find no evidence that this $1,300 increase arises from health reform or could have been prevented by a bill whose strongest provisions have yet to kick in…. "Young workers who buy their own insurance will see a 19%-30% increase in premiums as a result of ObamaCare." This analysis cites an Avik Roy column in Forbes which cites an original analysis of health care markets in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Colorado by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. I’m not crazy about Avik’s column…. Avik is an outside advisor to the Romney campaign…. At least Roy properly references the pertinent details. Readers of healthreformquestions.com would not know several important facts noted by Gruber himself to Ezra Klein last year…. Then there’s the strange discussion of preexisting condition health plans (PCIP) and high risk pools…. Pretty much everything is incorrect here…. Senator DeMint’s writers divide a tendentious estimate of the total costs for the entire full-implemented health reform effort which serves many millions of Americans over a full decade. They then divided this total ten-year expenditure by last year’s enrollment in one tiny and temporary program that accounts for maybe 0.25 percent of total spending under health reform….
[W]hat’s disgraceful here is not that Independent Women’s Voice chooses to peddle crude propaganda under the guise of educating people about health reform. That’s who they are and what they do. The real disgrace is that the Wall Street Journal regularly grants op-ed space for people to make claims that couldn’t pass a ten-minute fact-check in the bottom paragraph of its fashion or sports pages…
