ABC's lousy health care reporting
November 16, 2009 2:11 pm ET by Jamison Foser
Here's how ABC reporter Troy McMullen begins an article headlined "Health Care Reform Likely to Include More Taxes for Many Americans":
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama had one central message to middle-income Americans: no new taxes.
Really? I'd have said Obama's "central message" was "change." Or maybe "hope." I guess I must have missed Obama's "Ready My Lips: No New Taxes" pledge.
McMullen continues:
But as a massive health care reform bill inches closer to reality, middle-class Americans, as well as high income earners, can expect some sort of increase in what they pay into government coffers, say Republican critics and some fiscal watch dog groups.
...
It would also impose a 40 percent tax on the portion of insurance premiums exceeding $8,000 a year for individuals and $21,000 a year for family plans. That tax would be imposed on insurance companies, though it would likely be passed on to consumers, including many middle-income families, say experts.
Which "fiscal watch dog groups"? Which "experts"? McMullen doesn't say.
Later:
Some Republicans and Wall Street investors say tapping into high-end earners and capital gains will soak the rich and hurt an already ailing economy.
"Could there be a more efficient way to kill our halting recovery from recession than to have Harry Reid plot in secret to raise taxes?" says Donald Luskin, chief investment officer at Trend Macrolytics LLC. "Have we learned no economic lessons from the Depression?"
Despite the use of the plural "Wall Street Investors," Luskin is the only one mentioned. And Luskin is ... Well, Donald Luskin is simply not someone who should ever be taken seriously. Ever.
Eventually, ABC's McMullen gets around to citing someone a bit more credible than Don Luskin:
According to a report by the Tax Foundation, a tax research group based in Washington, D.C., wealthy taxpayers in 39 states could pay a top tax rate higher than 50 percent by 2011.
But that's about wealthy taxpayers. The ABC article has been hyping potential tax increases for middle-class taxpayers.
So the ABC article doesn't quote or paraphrase or cite a single source actually substantiating its basic premise; the closest it comes is a vague and hyperbolic claim by Donald Luskin, someone you shouldn't trust to tell you what year it is, much less analyze health care legislation. (Luskin, by the way, is not identified as a conservative in McMullen's article.)
And the article repeatedly stresses the cost of health care reform:
But as a massive health care reform bill inches closer to reality, middle-class Americans, as well as high income earners, can expect some sort of increase in what they pay into government coffers, say Republican critics and some fiscal watch dog groups.
...
But Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska says he'll vote to block any health care bill that looks like the bill passed by the House. "The costs are extraordinary associated with it," he told ABC News. "It increases taxes in a way that will not pass in the Senate. I won't vote to move it."
...
All of the health care packages are expensive. The House bill is projected to cost $1.2 trillion over 10 years and the Senate Finance Committee bill is projected to cost $829 billion. Taxes will increase if any of the plans are enacted, say experts.
But no mention of the fact that the House bill would decrease the deficit. That's kind of an important detail that should be mentioned if ABC is going to hype the cost, don't you think?
Then there's this:
The House GOP bill, which was rejected a week ago, had no new taxes. Republicans would get savings by capping medical liability awards, stepping up efforts to fight Medicare and Medicaid fraud, and setting up an approval process for generic versions of high-tech drugs.
Yeah, and the House GOP bill would only cover 3 million people, would have almost no effect on most premiums, and result in far less deficit reduction than the Democratic bill. Again: Those seem like relevant details, no?
UPDATE: I neglected to mention this earlier, but The Tax Foundation is funded by foundations affiliated with Richard Mellon Scaife and Koch Industries, among others. Not to mention Exxon Mobile. There is, in other words, ample reason to take its assertions with a grain of salt, though ABC described the group simply as "a tax research group based in Washington, D.C."
That might be accurate if congress enacted the bill...with a pledge to make no future changes that caused more spending on the cost of the program...and there is fat chance of that happening.
As with all govt. programs the politicians have never been able to keep their hands off...they just keep tinkering and "adding" more provisions...which means the cost of healthcare reform will cost many times more than the one proposed.
I wonder what happens to the cost projections if congress passed an amnesty bill for illegal aliens...adding 12-20 million more to the plan?...A plan that at best is marginally sustainable and judging from history sure to explode the cost/revenue projections by the CBO...without the influx of illegal aliens.
That's been my argument from day one to all the health reform deniers due to too much spending nutjobs.
It's not easily quantifiable. It's just too darn complicated. It's much more simple to yell "I want my country back" or go teabaggin' or something.
Nonsense...opposition to the Obama/democrat plan is not a call for inaction and maintaining the status quo...but you knew that already.
Allowing insurance companies to sell substandard insurance policies in some states that don't allow those plans currently is a violation of state's rights, and would disadvantage those insured individuals in an effort to pretend that the Republicans efforts actually does something to reduce costs in order to lower premiums! Premiums will go down because of lowered benefits and higher deductibles, not because of any improvements to lower the cost of healthcare coverage.
And the other main facet? Tort reform. Except tort reform doesn't touch 99.5% of the costs.
We need to cover more people and lower the cost curve. The Democratic bill does both those things pretty well. The Republican bill doesn't do either one of those things.
Failure to do something today to accomplish something better tomorrow would be much wiser than following any path your side has suggested. But it's a crisis, so things need to get done now.
Sweet fancy moses...the meat of the coconut.
Some are not as easily fooled as others with the manipulation of the cost estimates and delayed implementation...you're one of them...congrats!
Facts - they make your life so miserable, don't they, Wesley?
Health care was 1/7 of the economy in 1994. Now it's 1/6 with skyrocketing premiums. When would you like to fix it?
Liberals wanted the "under 65" part of medicare erased yesterday. Don't look at us for the boondoggle lumbering through congress now.
Like when you start a business, you don't get to start taking profits out right away as the owner.
This is not rocket science.
That's straight from social security online. Sounds like to me, they started paying benefits the SAME month they started collecting revenue. Even if it hadn't been instantly, it would be understandable. People usually don't retire instantly. People who don't have insurance, don't have insurance right now.
Medicare was passed into law on July 30, 1965 but beneficiaries were first able to sign-up for the program on July 1, 1966.--Social Security Online
Only took a year before people could get medicare. At least a year NOW would only mean another 40K would die. After all it's a crisis.
I'll leave it to the naive to believe that the current proposed legislation and the CBO cost estimates are a one and done deal.
His quote, in full - note that Wesley dishonestly cropped it.
But no mention of the fact that the House bill would decrease the deficit. That's kind of an important detail that should be mentioned if ABC is going to hype the cost, don't you think?
Wesley failed to copy the part that shows that we're talking about the bill as configured, and so we should get info about the bill as configured decreasing the deficit as configured!!!
Omitting that info by the media is conservative misinformation.
Wesley's distraction is an effort to ignore the fact that ABC omitted relevant info, really, really relevant info in this story supposedly talking about the important things to know about the healthcare bill! If we're going to talk about the costs of this bill as configured, it's only fair to talk about the deficit reduction offered as configured.
I'm always open if you can find some ten year CBO projections that have come in as projected.
Your premise is based on faith in the CBO projections. I made a simple request for you to show the history of the accuracy of CBO 10 year projections that would lend credibility to your assertion.
Find those CBO program estimates and the actual cost/revenue 10 years later and we'll have something to discuss.
In the words of a famous but long gone mmfa poster...bushbamboozled...get to digging or get gone.
Really, how much is it worth to try to save 40,000 people a year? To keep people healthier? To avoid financial ruin?
Betcha it'll be more than ANY projected cost increase you can produce.
I betcha.
I also believe we need to reform healthcare...but not in the fashion of the democrat plan.
We need to address coverage of pre-existing conditions...portabilility of coverage...tort reform...allowing interstate competition for health insurance...and...gasp...I support helping those who cannot afford insurance by providing assistance.
Hell yes to healthcare reform...but a big hell no to the democrat soulution.
http://www.healthbeatblog.com/2009/09/why-cbo-cannot-calculate-the-savings-that-will-come-with-healthcare-reform-part-1.html
"The CBO’s track record in predicting the effects of health legislation is abysmal,” observes Bruce Vladeck, the man who ran Medicare while serving as administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration from 1993 to 2007. “Over the last two decades, the CBO has routinely overestimated the costs of expanded government health care benefits,” Vladeck adds, “and underestimated the savings from program changes designed to reduce expenditures.”
No one on the right is arguing that we do nothing. The op-ed piece out of the Times is exactly what we need to be doing, find places that do it right, study them and then implement the changes. My fear, from reading HR 3200 and the senate bill (I have not had time to read the combines bill), is that, this will not happen. I don't think a new giant government bureaucracy can accomplish the true change in our system of healthcare delivery. Cuts in medicare and medicaid are only going to be transferred to private insurers. That along with the other anticompetative aspects of this legislation will eventually lead to complete government control of our healthcare system. I really hope that, for the sake of this country, if this thing passes, that the liberals are right. I'm just afraid they aren't.
I hear talking points. The same tired talking points.
The giant bureaucracy is the Health Choices Administration that will be headed by the Health Choices Commisioner. Ring a bell? Not to mention that basically, a from the ground up, new insurance company will have to be formed if there is a public option. The $622B in cuts to medicare and medicaids already anemic reimbursment rates. It's been talked about on the news and I'm not talking FOX. I mean your kinda news. Ya know CNN, MSNBC, ABC, ect. Finally, let's talk about anticompetative. First of all, how does a private company that has to make a profit to stay in existance, compete against an entity that does not have to turn profit but can infact deficit spend? Then there are the provision that makes insurance companies rebate a portion of their profits back to consumers. The public option won't have to be concerned with that because it won't have to worry about making a profit.
It's not a talking point. Read the bills. It's in there.
So next time, before you go babbling the old liberal standby "talking points" crap, you should do a little research.
Thank you for the wonderful link...which parroted my sentiments about the danger of relying on CBO estimates. Here are a few more snippets from your link:
-- Just how likely is it that CBO can accurately predict the cost of health care reform-and the savings that it will generate-- over a ten year period? Virtually any economic predictions that attempt to go out ten years are, at best, guesstimates. Few investors would attempt to project a single company's earnings out over ten years: how can one "score" the effect of very complicated legislation on a $2.6 trillion industry? --
-- "The CBO's track record in predicting the effects of health legislation is abysmal," observes Bruce Vladeck, the man who ran Medicare while serving as administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration from 1993 to 2997. --
-- Three major Health Reform changes with an average error rate of more than 46%. That's nearly half. Wrong by nearly half. --
-- So, instead of treating CBO estimates like the Ten Commandments, we should treat them like the informed wild guesses they actually are. --
Thanks again for the great link on the unintentional but abysmal record of the CBO estimeates....keep digging.
And Wesley has refused on multiple occasions to acknowledge that, because he's a troll not interested in actually discussing an issue, but rather in derailing threads by talking about how poor the CBO is.
What part of this don't you understand? Because we all see that you neglected to address this issue in my previous post.
You don't have a leg to stand on, here, Wesley.
It doesn't matter if the costs will go up, or if the deficit numbers might get skewed by additional spending or benefits added later. If we're getting info about the costs, then the deficit savings should be covered too.
And given the discussion about costs of both plans, they should mention the better deficit reduction, as configured, of the Democratic plan.
But the issue being discussed here is the one I kept coming back to, not the distraction that troll Wesley kept pushing.
But ABC is correct that the non-wealthy will be hit by new taxes on business. It's nonsense to think that any private industry hit by a substantial new tax won't lower its wages and raise its prices. Investors will take a hit, too, but even that group isn't all millionaires, what with pension funds and so forth invested heavily in the stock market.
--Bill Ahern, Tax Foundation
But in the real world, there are other factors at play that allow businesses to make decisions on a MACRO level.
Such as: lower long-term health plan costs and lower burdened costs on employees as the BENEFITS of a new national health bill.
And no, DellDolly, I wasn't saying that the personal income surtax would cause higher prices and lower wages. That criticism was directed at the other taxes in the bills, those hitting health care providers such as medical device manufacturers, etc.
--Bill
Businesses having to raise costs/lower wages/decrease profits as a result of increased taxes on the very wealthy owners isn't raising taxes on middle income people!
Businesses having to raise costs/lower wages/decrease profits as a result of increased taxes on the very wealthy owners isn't raising taxes on middle income people!
Those were the comments of then representative Rahm Emanuel concerning the 10 yr cost of medicare drug coverage debate in 2005. And that was when the White House came back with new estimations, upping it's original of $400B to $534B. Will those word come back and haunt him? When you consider the in 1966 medicare costs were about $3B and the Ways and Means Committee estimated that the 1990 cost would be an inflation factored $12B. The ACTUAL costs were $107B. Not twice as much, almost 10X as much. There is an unfortunate history of gross underestimation concerning government healthcare. Underestimations that we cannot afford with a bill that costs this much.
True enough. We're not talking about a $300k on ramp that came in wildly over budget and cost a million bucks...trillions of dollars is a deal breaker and one that will bankrupt our already staggering economy.
Good grief. How much of the Fox News, Rush Limbaugh & GOP Kool-Aid talking points do you consume in a single day?