Media Malpractice
The Fourth Estate is certainly doing its part for Obamacare

RAMESH PONNURU

On October 7, the Congressional Budget Office released a preliminary analysis of Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus’s health-care bill. The report said that the bill would net the government $81 billion over ten years — on certain assumptions, which the report itself suggested were unrealistic.

The report, for one thing, factored in $200 billion in reduced physician payments under Medicare. Congress has habitually enacted smaller payment cuts and then balked at letting them take effect; the CBO report went out of its way to mention that habit. The CBO assumed, further, that Congress would heap new burdens on people who get their health insurance from their employers, without offering them new subsidies. If the bill passes, it will, in short, almost certainly increase the deficit.

Democrats, naturally, ignored the fine print in their press releases. So did most of the press.

The morning after the CBO assessment came out, Maggie Rodriguez, a co-host of The Early Show on CBS, said, “President Obama’s health-care plan gets a green light from the Congressional Budget Office, as a key bill not only pays for itself, but actually saves billions.” She threw the story to Nancy Cordes, who repeated the spin: “The new bill would actually reduce the federal deficit by $81 billion according to the new estimates. The price tag, $829 billion over ten years, would be fully paid for, and then some, by an excise tax on top-dollar insurance plans, by fees on drug makers and medical-device manufacturers, and more.” The two were back on the evening news. This time, Rodriguez said that “according to a new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the plan costs less than expected and would actually reduce the deficit. So why do Republicans still oppose it?”

At no point in either the morning or the evening did anyone on CBS cast doubt on whether the bills would “actually” save billions for the federal government, let alone for anyone else. (My thanks to the Media Research Center for transcribing the segments.)

But that network was not alone in its credulousness. On the front page of the Washington Post, Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray reported that the CBO had said the bill would “keep President Obama’s pledge that [health-care legislation] would not add ‘one dime’ to federal budget deficits.” The duo did not mention that the CBO had also questioned the realism of its own forecast. The story was the same at the New York Times, where another pair of reporters, also on the front page, also said that the president’s not-one-dime promise had been kept, and also said nothing about the unbelievable assumptions of the analysis.

Gullibility regarding liberal claims about health care, combined with skepticism toward conservative ones, seems to be a chronic condition for most reporters on the health-care beat. Journalists have not always and everywhere exhibited this condition, of course, but quite a few have succumbed.

Earlier this year, Ceci Connolly reported, in another front-page story for the Washington Post, that people who go without health insurance raise premiums for the rest of us by $1,000 a year. Supporters of universal coverage routinely invoke this factoid. It’s not a fact. The source is a left-wing advocacy group, and nonpartisan observers, including the CBO, believe that the real premium increase is much smaller, perhaps $220 a year.

In the same piece, Connolly reported that the U.S. spends more money on health care than other countries while generating less impressive statistics. She specifically cited our high infant-mortality rate — without mentioning that we have, for example, a higher proportion of low-birthweight babies than other countries, which is hardly the fault of our system of health finance.

Maybe Connolly’s worst blunder was to report that there is a “consensus” that the cost of health care undermines the competitiveness of American business. That consensus includes other news outlets, such as Reuters, and President Obama. There is a directly opposed consensus that includes most health-care economists, the CBO, and some members of Obama’s economic team. It holds that health-care costs come out of wages, not profits, and thus generally do not affect firms’ competitiveness.

Several news outlets, notably Reuters and the Los Angeles Times, fell for a study purporting to show that health expenses were the reason for most household bankruptcies. But that study counted bankruptcies caused by deaths in the family, alcohol and drug addiction, and reckless gambling as “medical” in nature. Most of the bankrupts in the study did not judge health care to be at the root of their troubles. (Several of the study’s many other flaws were picked apart by Megan McArdle, a writer for The Atlantic.)

Journalists’ use of the phrase “health-care reform” has also skewed the debate. The Washington Post headlined a story on Sen. Jim DeMint “S.C. Senator Is a Voice of Reform Opposition.” Actually, DeMint has long championed a variety of free-market health-care reforms. He is a voice of opposition to the health-policy changes that Democrats are currently seeking, but it is inappropriate for journalists who aspire to objectivity to identify those changes, and only those changes, with “reform.”

None of this is to say that the watchdogs of the press have been asleep during the health-care debate. Reporters have aggressively pointed out what they regard as inaccuracies. But they have concentrated mostly on the alleged inaccuracies of conservatives, and frequently gotten their facts wrong in the process.

Newsweek has provided several classics of the genre. In one story, Sharon Begley and three other reporters purported to expose “The Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate.” All of them were propagated by what Begley called, yes, “opponents of health-care reform.” If Begley ever considered the possibility that people on the other side of the debate might on some occasions have engaged in “lies and exaggerations” of their own, she left no evidence of it in her story.

Among the supposed lies Newsweek went after was the claim that illegal immigrants would receive subsidies under the House Democrats’ bill: “Can we say that none of the estimated 11.9 million illegal immigrants will ever wangle insurance subsidies through identity fraud, pretending to be a citizen? You can’t prove a negative, but experts say that Medicare — the closest thing to the proposals in the House bill — has no such problem.” The accusation of deceit rests on a series of non sequiturs. The House bill does not require that the legal status of beneficiaries be verified, so no illegal immigrant would have to commit identity fraud to get subsidies. Medicare, on the other hand, has a verification mechanism, since eligibility for it is linked to receipt of Social Security.

Much of the press took a similar line when Rep. Joe Wilson accused President Obama of lying about illegal immigrants’ ability to get health-care subsidies. Obama was right, reporters claimed, and Wilson wrong. Several fact-checking institutions, notably the St. Petersburg Times’s unjustly acclaimed PolitiFact, backed up Obama. Newsweek came back to the issue on its website, with Andrew Romano repeating all of Begley’s mistakes and also giving credence to the myth that uninsured people raise premiums $1,000 a year.

Abortion is another topic that the press has repeatedly fumbled. Few journalists have shown any interest in getting up to speed on the issue, which enables the Obama administration and its allies to get away with misleading statement after misleading statement. When White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said on October 7 that “there’s a law that precludes the use of federal funds for abortion” and that “these health-care bills” do not change that law, none of the reporters pointed out that the law in question applies only to Medicaid, that the bills create new funding streams outside of Medicaid, or that Obama has advocated abolishing the law.

Large topics, meanwhile, have gone almost completely unexplored in the press. The Baucus bill creates effective marginal tax rates of nearly 75 percent for people with low to moderate incomes, because of the way they lose benefits as they get raises. Are the benefits of the bill worth that cost? People who watch the nightly news or read the newspapers won’t consider that question because they won’t be aware the cost exists. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of Republican alternatives to the legislation under consideration? What, for that matter, are those alternatives? These are questions in which most reporters have shown little interest.

The press has often depicted opponents of the health legislation moving through Congress as angry. Perhaps one reason for that anger is that the reporters aren’t giving their point of view a fair shake.

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