Fox Panel Teams Up To Promote A Bushel Of Misinformation On Health Care Reform
A seven-minute segment on Fox News' America Live featured a deluge of falsehoods and distortions about President Obama's health care reform record, including the false suggestion that PricewaterhouseCoopers found that health care reform is responsible for rising costs. In fact, Pricewaterhouse found that reform is "expected to have minimal impact on [the] medical cost trend in 2012."Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong would be proud of Fox News they do exactly the same job for the far Right what Mao's ministry of information did for the communists. Fox News considers what it knows are lies as permissible because they are supposedly lies told for the greater good. This is the same rationale that communist propagandist used.
Camerota: "We've Told You About A McKinsey Report." Guest host Alisyn Camerota began the segment by stating, "President Obama's health care law facing more heat today. We've told you about a McKinsey report saying nearly a third of American employers could drop their health care plans." [Fox News, America Live, 6/21/11]
Research Expert Likened McKinsey Survey To "Push Polling." Floyd Fowler, "a Senior ResearchFellow at the Center for Survey Research at University of Massachusetts, Boston, and author of the book Survey Research Methods," said of the McKinsey survey:
"There is no doubt that the answers one would get after priming respondents the way they did would be expected to include more expressed interest in the possibility of not insuring employees than a question asked in a nonprimed context."
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"[T]he fact that someone spent time thinking up, then outlining to corporations, ways to circumvent the law in such amazing ways seems like a pretty good story all by itself," Fowler says. "... What is intriguing to me is whether in fact they may have increased corporation interest in exploring ways to avoid providing insurance to their employees by the act of suggesting these possible approaches. In the political polling world, as you probably know, push polling is used to plant ideas in voters' heads: If I told you that CANDIDATE A has had two abortions and stopped going to church at an early age, who would you be most likely to vote for: A or B? Such a question will change the distribution of answers, but also may disseminate ideas about candidate A." [Talking Points Memo, 6/23/11]
In Fact, PricewaterhouseCoopers Found Reform Is "Expected To Have Minimal Impact On Medical Cost Trend In 2012." From a PricewaterhouseCoopers report on medical cost trends for 2012:
Health reform expected to have minimal impact on medical cost trend in 2012
Most of the major provisions under the PPACA are in the future. The Medicaid expansions, health insurance exchanges, subsidies to buy private insurance, mandates for employers to offer insurance, and mandates for individuals to buy it -- all of these take place in 2014 or later.
TNR's Cohn: Health Care Reform Law Includes Cost Controls. New Republic senior editor Jonathan Cohn wrote:
The Affordable Care Act represents a serious and realistic approach to controlling the cost of medicine -- one that would be even more serious and realistic if the long-term budget changes President Barack Obama just recommended become law.
[...]
Like [Rep. Paul] Ryan's plan, the Affordable Care Act attempts to restrict the federal government's contribution toward health care expenses, via constraints limiting the growth in Medicare (although not Medicaid) costs as well as the tax subsidy working-age Americans get for employer-sponsored insurance. But the constraints are looser. For example, unlike Ryan's plan, which uses a fixed-value voucher to set Medicare spending, the health law sets less restrictive growth targets (which the president's debt plan would further tighten) and then calls upon an independent commission -- the Independent Payment Advisory Board -- to recommend reforms when Medicare costs exceed those targets. IPAB's recommendations can change what Medicare pays the providers of care, but the board, by law, cannot alter Medicare benefits or eligibility.
In addition, the health law's formula doesn't attempt to reduce spending by focusing exclusively on direct cuts to individual beneficiaries. On the contrary, the law distributes spending reductions across the health care system, affecting virtually everybody -- whether it's reducing Medicare payments to hospitals, eliminating extra subsidies for private Medicare Advantage plans or demanding greater rebates from pharmaceutical companies that contract with government insurance programs.
Most important, the Affordable Care Act doesn't merely limit health care spending, in the faint hope that consumers, on their own, will produce a more efficient market. The law also introduces reforms that will put in place technological infrastructure and financial incentives to promote higher quality care. To some extent, that means sweeping, system-wide changes like the introduction of electronic medical records or the creation of an institute that will determine which treatments work better than others. But it also means dozens of more narrowly focused efforts, like a new public-private partnership to promote quality care or pilot programs in "smart malpractice reform." The idea is to experiment with virtually every payment reform experts have tried successfully on a small scale, in the hopes of replicating the successful ones across the country. [The New Republic, 4/14/11]
Fox's Siegel Portrays Comparative Effectiveness Initiatives As "Rationing," Ignores That Rationing Is Already Happening
But U.S. Insurance Companies Already Ration Care. WellPoint chief medical officer Dr. Sam Nussbaum said that "where the private sector has been far more effective than government programs is in limiting clinical services to those that are best meeting the needs of patients." [NPR, Morning Edition, 7/15/09] Moreover, in Senate testimony, Wendell Potter, a former senior executive at the health insurance company CIGNA, detailed ways in which the insurance industry makes cost-based coverage decisions, including how "insurers routinely dump policyholders who are less profitable or who get sick" and "also dump small businesses whose employees' medical claims exceed what insurance underwriters expected." [Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, 7/24/09]
