The McCain Campaign Makes Up Its Own Facts on Health Care
Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal is moderating a debate between my long-time friend David Cutler of the Obama campaign and Jay Khosla of the McCain campaign--and lets, without editorial comment, Khosla make false statements about the Obama campaign health care proposals.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. And everyone is entitled to their own analytica view about the way the world works. But everyone is not entitled to their own facts.
The WSJ does its readers no good service when it doesn't provide basic fact checking about campaign characterizations of their opponents' proposals.
Khosla claims that the Obama campaign plan contains an employer mandate. It doesn't. Cutler and company got thwacked regularly throughout the primaries because the plan set forth did not contain a universal mandate of any sort:
http://hillaryclintonclub.com/2008/04/voters-see-very-different-healthcare.html Hillary Cinton Club: Clinton's plan, with an estimated $110 billion annual price tag for the government, would require everyone to have coverage. Obama would make coverage mandatory only for children. His plan would cost roughly $50 billion to $65 billion a year. "If it's accessible and affordable, they'll buy it, independent of whether they have to buy it or not," says David Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard who's advising the Obama campaign. Not true, argues the Clinton camp. Without a mandate, some people, especially young, healthy ones, are going to skip signing up, and their participation is key to balancing out the higher healthcare costs of those who are sick. Who's right? It's not clear, though economists have generally sided with Clinton on this issue...
http://blog.econtech.selfip.org/2008/02/more-on-health-insurance-mandates/ Richard Eskow: The Obama plan does not include mandates. Health mandates are popular among many Democratic-leaning health policy analysts. The Clinton campaign has been going after Obama aggressively on this issue. They’ve said that the absence of mandates is a basic flaw in Obama’s plan; suggested a cynical political calculus behind Obama’s position said that his position feeds a Republican narrative; and took the position that Obama’s plan is politically vulnerable while theirs (and Edwards’) is a political plus in the general election...
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/02/david-cutler-on.html Tyler Cowen: Cutler is very smart, tenured at Harvard, arguably the leading health care economist, and yes he is an advisor to Barack Obama. He says mandates are not the way to go, and no I do not think he is just "falling in line" here. Read the whole thing. Yes, the key is to make insurance cheaper, not more expensive. Yes, mandates are a political loser. Yes, ex post fiddling can make up for a lot of the problems in the "no mandate" approach and there is going to be lots of ex post fiddling anyway...
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=another_note_on_richard_eskows Ezra Klein: Here's the thing: The Obama plan does not make health insurance affordable. It does not arrest its growth. It does not even come close. Nor, it should be said, does Clinton's plan. But Clinton's plan, by establishing a universal health system, creates the pressures and incentives to retain and improve a universal health system -- otherwise, you have hordes of angry citizens caught between a mandate they can't evade and a plan they can't afford. Obama's plan makes some incremental improvements, but by not creating a universal system or having intense cost controls (and none of the plans do, as such controls are not politically palatable), it will simply return to a state of slow deterioration. So the difference between the plans is that in Clinton's case, we know the spur that will force her to continue reforming, improving, and pressuring the system: It's the mandate. With Obama, we don't know what that spur is, save for a generalized desire to improve the health care system. And I don't trust that as enough. Rather, I worry that attention will turn to other things, and though our system will be better for Obama's improvements, it will not be sufficiently changed, and it will definitely not be universal...
Yet you printed what Jay Khosla wrote that:
Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal is moderating a debate between my long-time friend David Cutler of the Obama campaign and Jay Khosla of the McCain campaign--and lets, without editorial comment, Khosla make false statements about the Obama campaign health care proposals. Jay Khosla either does not know what the Obama health plan is, or knows and is a sociopath who does not mind lying one whit. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. And everyone is entitled to their own analytica view about the way the world works. But everyone is not entitled to their own facts.
The WSJ does its readers no good service when it doesn't provide basic fact checking about campaign characterizations of their opponents' proposals.
Jay Khosla writes:
http://blogs.wsj.com/agenda/category/health/ Shaping the new Agenda: Health: Jay Khosla: The Obama plan imposes an employer mandate to provide coverage while simultaneously allowing employers to simply put them in the national plan. Faced with tough economic conditions and rising health care costs, this creates a clear incentive for employers to simply drop coverage and move their employees into the national plan. According to a study done by the Lewin Group on John Edwards plan, which had a very similar employer mandate combined with a national plan option, almost 52 million individuals would lose their private employer coverage...
May I ask why you printed this? Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. And everyone is entitled to their own analytica view about the way the world works. But everyone is not entitled to their own facts. The WSJ should either have blown the whistle and told Khosla to go back and rewrite without patently false characterizations of his opponent's proposals, or should have engaged in some in-line editorial fact-checking, or should have run a debate like this only with a neutral arbiter-referee on the field to call intellectual fouls.
I know that Laura Meckler knows what is going on with the McCain campaign here. She is an excellent reporter, and I recall the well-done http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120882415111033181.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. But the WSJ is not doing its readers any good service when i presents Cutler vs. Khosla in the raw this way.
Jay Khosla writes:
Shaping the new Agenda: Health: The Obama plan imposes an employer mandate to provide coverage while simultaneously allowing employers to simply put them in the national plan. Faced with tough economic conditions and rising health care costs, this creates a clear incentive for employers to simply drop coverage and move their employees into the national plan.
According to a study done by the Lewin Group on John Edwards plan, which had a very similar employer mandate combined with a national plan option, almost 52 million individuals would lose their private employer coverage...
At this point Laura Meckler should have blown the whistle and told Khosla to go back and rewrite. Under the Obama campaign plan firms that don't offer employer-sponsored coverage are required to pay 6% of payroll to help pay for the costs of covering the uninsured, so in many cases it would make business sense to add private-employer coverage (and the number of workers with such coverage would grow, not shrink). But there is no requirement that firms do so: there simply is no employer mandate.
Indeed, when David Cutler was doing his briefings on Obama campaign ideas about health care during the primaries, he get regularly thwacked because the Obama campaign plan expressly did not include an employer mandate.
Hillary Cinton Club: Clinton's plan, with an estimated $110 billion annual price tag for the government, would require everyone to have coverage. Obama would make coverage mandatory only for children. His plan would cost roughly $50 billion to $65 billion a year. "If it's accessible and affordable, they'll buy it, independent of whether they have to buy it or not," says David Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard who's advising the Obama campaign. Not true, argues the Clinton camp. Without a mandate, some people, especially young, healthy ones, are going to skip signing up, and their participation is key to balancing out the higher healthcare costs of those who are sick. Who's right? It's not clear, though economists have generally sided with Clinton on this issue...
Richard Eskow: The Obama plan does not include mandates. Health mandates are popular among many Democratic-leaning health policy analysts. The Clinton campaign has been going after Obama aggressively on this issue. They’ve said that the absence of mandates is a basic flaw in Obama’s plan; suggested a cynical political calculus behind Obama’s position said that his position feeds a Republican narrative; and took the position that Obama’s plan is politically vulnerable while theirs (and Edwards’) is a political plus in the general election...
Tyler Co WEN: Cutler is very smart, tenured at Harvard, arguably the leading health care economist, and yes he is an advisor to Barack Obama. He says mandates are not the way to go, and no I do not think he is just "falling in line" here. Read the whole thing. Yes, the key is to make insurance cheaper, not more expensive. Yes, mandates are a political loser. Yes, ex post fiddling can make up for a lot of the problems in the "no mandate" approach and there is going to be lots of ex post fiddling anyway...
Ezra Klein: Here's the thing: The Obama plan does not make health insurance affordable. It does not arrest its growth. It does not even come close. Nor, it should be said, does Clinton's plan. But Clinton's plan, by establishing a universal health system, creates the pressures and incentives to retain and improve a universal health system -- otherwise, you have hordes of angry citizens caught between a mandate they can't evade and a plan they can't afford. Obama's plan makes some incremental improvements, but by not creating a universal system or having intense cost controls (and none of the plans do, as such controls are not politically palatable), it will simply return to a state of slow deterioration. So the difference between the plans is that in Clinton's case, we know the spur that will force her to continue reforming, improving, and pressuring the system: It's the mandate. With Obama, we don't know what that spur is, save for a generalized desire to improve the health care system. And I don't trust that as enough. Rather, I worry that attention will turn to other things, and though our system will be better for Obama's improvements, it will not be sufficiently changed, and it will definitely not be universal...
I am no match for David Cutler on the economics of health care, but I tend to think that the Democratic critiques of the Obama campaign proposals have pointed out a problem with it--that the Obama campaign plan is likely to work better with an employer mandate than without. But it does not have a mandate.
And for Khosla to say, and for the WSJ to print, that Obama's health care plan does contain an employer mandate is below the bar.
