Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition
ย I don’t usually pass along a Krugman piece, but the ACA is familiar territory for AB.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
21 August 12
here are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek – I guess they don’t do fact-checking – but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:
The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012-22 period.
Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit – because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.
Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that’s not the argument Ferguson is making – he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.
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We’re not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here – just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers. The Times would require an abject correction if something like that slipped through. Will Newsweek?
See Also: Niall Ferguson Publishes Embarrassing Defense Of Newsweek Article
Good Morning:
One of the issues I attempt to explain in my up and coming post is the differences between the initial savings calculation and this later one resulting from a letter by House Majority Leader John Boehner to Douglas Elmendorf asking what would happen with a repeal of the PPACA.
Elmendorf (the man who spupply the nails for the Hillarycare coffin) calculated teh costs and savings from 2012 to 2022, a ten year span. The initial calculation was made from 2010 to 2019, a ten year span. So far so good. The difference in the two calculations is how much of the PPACA is covered within each calculation. The PPACA takes effect 2014 in which case 4-5 years of it was missing from the original calculation and mostly picked in the later more recent calculation. In the later calculation you will see an increase in cost and an increase in the projected savings. Obviously, this is not enough to satisfy the party of “No”rquist whom it appears to pledge allegiance to rather than the elected and partially uninsured constituency lanquishing in a healthcare world which offers them little and duns them for payment.
Literally and economically, there is no alternative on the table. There are the hopes and dreams of single payer and universal care many of my fellow writers and the experts (who write at a higher and exalted level than I); but, neither happened. We can discuss the Norquist sychopants and the blue dogs till we are blue in the faceand it will not change what we have today . . . something with a hope and an ability to work and a start to control costs.
If you have read the S&P indices which I have posted over the months, healthcare costs are begining to slow as the PPACA takes effect. Medicare started much earlier as it had a tighter control on its environment. Obama has pledged Medicare will now go out and begin to negotiate costs which will speed up the trend to the growth in GDP or it +1%.
Anyhoo, enough for now and later.
Truth is, there are so many contingencies and “what ifs” in the implementation of PPACA no one can really estimate what will happen.
save_the_rustbelt: “no one can really estimate what will happen.”
Score 1 for the Lord of the Oxide. ๐
Regarding the short Ferguson quote, I was concerned that it may have been taken out of context. So I checked. If it was taken out of context. it was Ferguson who neglected to supply it. ๐
I thought that the quote might make a good exercise for a critical thinking class. More on that later. The article itself is a masterpiece of polemic. The uninformed reader might come away with the impression that Ferguson favors increased Federal spending on infrastructure, science, and education, that he favors a single payer health plan, increased taxation, and increasing the minimum wage, to raise the incomes of the bottom 50%. OC, it is not that Ferguson favors such things, it is that he criticizes Obama for not achieving them. Instead of saying, “We preventing Obama from reaching his objectives. Yay for our side!” he blames Obama for not keeping his promises. Masterful!
On to the quote: “The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012-22 period.”
The second sentence starts with But. Now, “but” is a funny word. Logically it means “and”. But if we wanted to say “and” we would say “and”, not “but”. I expect that a whole book could be written about “but”, but let me just say that it is used to indicate a contradiction, a qualification, or a violation of expectations. Here Ferguson appears to be indicating a contradiction, especially with the “not add a cent” characterization, which is another rhetorical ploy that we could talk about. But careful reading — as Ferguson later points out in his deniability defense — shows that he does not make a contradiction.
One important principle that I would teach my critical thinking students is that when a politician or pundit leads you to think that he is going to say something but he actually doesn’t it is because he cannot. Here he makes you think that he is going to say that the new estimates of the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation are that the ACA will increase the deficit. Instead he say that they estimate that a portion of the ACA will have a “net cost” — whatever than means! — of a humungous sum. Now, Ferguson might have continued, “Therefore we might expect that the ACA will add at least a penny to the deficit.” But he did not. We may infer that he could not. Why? Probably because the CBO and the Joint Committee actually made a new estimate of the costs of the ACA as a whole and that their estimates did not contradict the President. In any event, we should conclude that Ferguson has no evidence that would lead him to believe that the ACA will add to the deficit. If he had it, he would have presented it.
All of this falls under what is called Pragmatics. ๐
If you’re hopeful for an Obama victory against Romney, then you should appreciate the hell out of the Newsweek story (even if it is riddled with errors).
The Republicans are crazy for even discussing Medicare…other than general platitudes.
If the Republicans were smart (yeah, yeah, [insert snark here]), they’d push an agenda for breaking up the big banks. The voting public, by and large, can relate to the issue and can track with it. And despite the “anti-regulation” rhetoric from The Right, there are plenty on the Right who see the Big Banks and their preferential handouts as just another extension to BIG Government.
Medicare, on the other hand, gets nothing but glassy eyes and deep yawns.
Medicare is an issue pursued by a 2nd term President in his 6th year…not a hopeful candidate with Romney’s lukewarm base.