What was that line from Mark Twain? “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.”
In the course of the last two days – and watching mostly Fox News, no less – I have at least four times heard an advocate for the Democrats’ health care boondoggle recite the crap statistic that “60% of bankruptcies are due to health care costs,” with nary a reply by the journalist who should be able to separate fact from fraud.
If you’re going to interview a liberal, be aware that lies tend to accompany the movement of their lips. When you have the latter, you almost certainly have the former.
It’s not that this hasn’t been repeatedly refuted. It’s that the lies are piling up far faster than the refutation can keep up with them. Democrats know from Hitler and Goebbels that if they keep telling a lie over and over again, people will eventually believe it. So we just keep hearing about this massive number of bankruptcies over and over again.
It’s not true.
From ABC News:
Medical Bankruptcies: A Data-Check
March 05, 2009 12:37 PM
(3 p.m. update: See italicized items with responses from the lead author of the Harvard study, Dr. David Himmelstein.)
President Obama’s kicking off his health care reform today in the worst possible way: with a mischaracterization of data.
“The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds,” Obama said at the opening of his White House forum on health care reform. The problem: That claim, based on a 2001 survey, is simply unsupportable.
The figure comes from a 2005 Harvard University study saying that 54 percent of bankruptcies in 2001 were caused by health expenses. We reviewed it internally and knocked it down at the time; an academic reviewer did the same in 2006. Recalculating Harvard’s own data, he came up with a far lower figure – 17 percent.
A more recent study by another group, approaching it another way, indicates that in 2007 about eight-tenths of one percent of Americans lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs. That rings a little less loudly than “one every 30 seconds.”
The extrapolation of Harvard’s data to “a bankruptcy every 30 seconds,” which Obama also mentioned in his address to a joint session of Congress last month, comes, per the White House, from a 2005 Washington Post op-ed by Prof. Elizabeth Warren, a co-author of the Harvard paper. Fact-check.org has noted that even using Harvard’s numbers, it’s more like a bankruptcy every minute; indeed if you add up all bankrputcies in a year you barely get one every 30 seconds. (I’ve e-mailed Warren for comment.) But more to the point is that the Harvard data are clearly inflated, or at best, mischaracterized.
Himmelstein tells me that the reason for the difference is a change in federal law that sharply reduced the number of bankruptcies. In 2005, the year he and Warren wrote their op-ed, there were just over 2 million bankruptcies. Data out just today say that in 2008 there were 1.1 million (up sharply, by the way, over 2007). So this error in the White House claim stems simply from the fact that it’s using out-of-date information. The next question is whether the estimate of “medical bankruptcies” is reliable in the first place.
A good part of the problem is definitional. The Harvard report claims to measure the extent to which medical costs are “the cause” of bankruptcies. In reality its survey asked if these costs were “a reason” – potentially one of many – for such bankruptcies.
Beyond those who gave medical costs as “a reason,” the Harvard researchers chose to add in any bankruptcy filers who had at least $1,000 in unreimbursed medical expenses in the previous two years. Given deductibles and copays, that’s a heck of a lot of people.
Moreover, Harvard’s definition of “medical” expenses includes situations that aren’t necessarily medical in common parlance, e.g., a gambling problem, or the death of a family member. If your main wage-earning spouse gets hit by a bus and dies, and you have to file, that’s included as a “medical bankruptcy.”
When I asked the lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, about his definitions of medical bankruptcy back in 2005, he said, “It’s a judgment call,” and added that any death, for example, “to our mind is a medical event.”
A last problem was sampling: The Harvard researchers surveyed bankruptcy filers in five federal court districts accounting for 14 percent of bankruptcies nationally; projecting this to the other 86 percent is sketchy. Said Himmelstein: “Obviously the extrapolation is rough.”
Of such rough extrapolations are presidential pronouncements made. […]
“It stinks to be uninsured. I don’t want to be quoted saying anything else,” Dranove says. “But there are correct studies, and incorrect studies. For academics, the validity of the research methods matters.”
It should for the rest of us, too.
So you see a horrible study – absolutely horrible – that is clearly biased and filled with faulty assumptions and questionable definitions. But it’s from Harvard, so it must be true. Let’s run with it. I noticed CBS and NBC news articles that did just that. Factchecks? We don’t need no stinkin’ factchecks.
ABC took that Harvard study, did their own review simply by recalculating the Harvard leftist professor’s own data – and came up with 17%. But they were also able to find another study that concluded: “about eight-tenths of one percent of Americans lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs.”
A professional named Steve Elias who specializes in bankruptcy cases comes to a similar conclusion regarding his own practice — that health care costs are at best a very minor part of our bankruptcies.
So every time I hear someone say “sixty percent of all bankruptcies are the result of health care costs, so we need to pass Obama care right now!” I know I am dealing with an ignoramus, or an ideologue, or both.
And every time I see that comment uttered to or in front of a journalist who doesn’t respond by correcting the record, I know that there’s yet another journalist out there who isn’t good enough at his or her job to pass muster.
Now, I could have stopped here. But let me go on – because there are WAY too many lies being told by Democrats.
(CBS) Today the President again insisted that his health care reform won’t force you to switch plans or doctors.
“What I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change your plans under health reform,” said Mr. Obama.
That’s technically correct – but what the president didn’t say is that reform could lead your boss to change your health care plan, reports CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. Here’s how: 160 million people are insured through work and their employer actually picks up most of the cost. Under the president’s plan, Americans would be required to carry a certain level of coverage, which means many people would have to increase their insurance.
“Employer premiums will go up, and employers might respond by dropping coverage entirely,” said Michael Cannon, with the Cato Institute. “So if you’re one of those unfortunate workers then it will be a government policy that ousted you from your health plan.”
And if you do choose a public plan, you may want to keep your favorite doctors but they may not want to keep you. Under government health care, they could be paid 20 to 30 percent less.
Here’s another gargantuan Obama lie. And – while I’m surprised and grateful that CBS took a swipe at it – I fear they didn’t go far enough, and won’t come back to the truth often enough.
A Wall Street Journal article absolutely destroys any claim to credibility Obama has in claiming that his plan won’t force tens of millions of people out of their private health care.
The last thing Obama and his Democrat allies have repeatedly lie about is that “Republicans are opposing reform.”
I would confront Obama by saying, “Name one. Name one single Republican who is on the record opposing any kind of health care reform.” It is demagogic rhetoric. And the president is clearly becoming unhinged to rely on such demagogic attacks to force a clearly unpopular agenda down the country’s throat.
President Obama went after Senator Jim DeMint for his “Waterloo” remark. DeMint, to his credit, fired right back, and pointed out that as a Senator Barack Obama voted against every Republican effort to reform health care. So, in point of fact, who’s really against “reform” here? And why doesn’t anybody remind Democrats how THEY were the party of “no” when Republicans were in charge prior to 2006 (which I might point out was prior to when our economy tanked).
There are way too many lies masquerading as truth claims going on. It’s time to recognize who is lying to you, and to demand a fair presentation of the facts.
Start Thinking Right 