Dishonest Fox Charts: Obamacare Enrollment Edition

Fox News showed a dramatically skewed chart to suggest enrollment for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would come up far short of the initial estimate of 7 million enrollees.

On March 27, health insurance enrollment through the ACA's exchanges surpassed 6 million, exceeding the revised estimate of enrollees for the program's first year before the March 31 open enrollment deadline. Enrollment appears on track to hit the Congressional Budget Office's initial estimate of 7 million sign-ups, and taking Medicaid enrollees into account, the ACA will have reportedly extended health care coverage to at least 9.5 million previously uninsured individuals.

Fox celebrated the final day of open enrollment by attempting to somehow twist the recent enrollment surge into bad news for the law.

America's Newsroom aired an extremely skewed bar chart which made it appear that the 6 million enrollees comprised roughly one-third of the 7 million enrollee goal:

bad chart

The difference between the March 27 enrollment figure and CBO's original estimate of 7 million enrollees is slightly less than 1 million, which Fox itself acknowledged with a more accurate representation the previous day on Sunday Morning Futures:

good chart

This attempt to misrepresent data is nothing new for Fox, which has a history of using dishonest charts to smear the Obama administration.

Watch the full segment here:

UPDATE:

Fox News corrected its dishonest chart on the April 1 edition of America's Newsroom, airing a new bar chart on Obamacare enrollment with a modified y-axis. Host Bill Hemmer acknowledged the error: “That was our mistake. Correction noted.”