Hugh Hewitt v. PolitiFact (Power Line Blog)

Via Power Line blog, the liberal bloggers at PolitiFact tangle with conservative radio show host Hugh Hewitt:

The issue: During a television appearance, Hewitt said the ACA is in a death spiral. PolitiFact did its usual limited survey of experts and ruled Hewitt's statement "False."

Part 1: PolitiFact Strikes Hugh Hewitt

A favorite part:

Allison Graves evaluates Hugh’s assertion regarding the Obamacare death spiral for PolitiFact. She defines the question in a manner that tends to belie Hugh’s assertion, cites some relevant authorities and rates Hugh’s assertion False.

I think this is a question on which reasonable minds can disagree, depending on how the question is framed. I would rate Graves’s judgment False in implying the contrary.

Part 2: Pol[i]tiFact strikes Hugh Hewitt (2)

A favorite part (quotation of Hewitt):

PolitiFact is a liberal-agenda-driven group of classically lefty “journalists” masquerading as a non-partisan evaluators of arguments. In this case their defense of their “journalism” rests on a partial and biased recounting of a 10:20 a.m. Meet the Press roundtable discussion, one which omits my stated acknowledgment of a differing argument therein, and their discounting of the expert testimony of a major insurance company president, along with a Sunday afternoon three-hour “deadline” window for response following a perfunctory email to a booker of a show that runs Monday through Friday, when the host is himself online and answering a journalists’ questions and comments.

To this we would add that PolitiFact's story misrepresents a Congressional Budget Office report.

PolitiFact cited the CBO in support of its finding that the ACA is not in a death spiral:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as part of its recent analysis of the GOP legislation, described the Affordable Care Act as stable.

PolitiFact failed to link to the CBO in this fact check, but the source wasn't hard to find. The tough part was figuring out why PolitiFact added its own spin to the CBO's view (bold emphasis added):

Stability of the Health Insurance Market>

Decisions about offering and purchasing health insurance depend on the stability of the health insurance market—that is, on having insurers participating in most areas of the country and on the likelihood of premiums’ not rising in an unsustainable spiral. The market for insurance purchased individually (that is, nongroup coverage) would be unstable, for example, if the people who wanted to buy coverage at any offered price would have average health care expenditures so high that offering the insurance would be unprofitable. In CBO and JCT’s assessment, however, the nongroup market would probably be stable in most areas under either current law or the legislation.

Under current law, most subsidized enrollees purchasing health insurance coverage in the nongroup market are largely insulated from increases in premiums because their out-of-pocket payments for premiums are based on a percentage of their income; the government pays the difference. The subsidies to purchase coverage combined with the penalties paid by uninsured people stemming from the individual mandate are anticipated to cause sufficient demand for insurance by people with low health care expenditures for the market to be stable.

Under the legislation, in the agencies’ view, key factors bringing about market stability include subsidies to purchase insurance, which would maintain sufficient demand for insurance by people with low health care expenditures, and grants to states from the Patient and State Stability Fund, which would reduce the costs to insurers of people with high health care expenditures. Even though the new tax credits would be structured differently from the current subsidies and would generally be less generous for those receiving subsidies under current law, the other changes would, in the agencies’ view, lower average premiums enough to attract a sufficient number of relatively healthy people to stabilize the market.

Is it defensible journalistic practice to leave out the "probably" and "most areas" caveats in the CBO report?

Something tells us that if PolitiFact caught a Republican omitting that kind of information, it would result in a rating of "Half True" or worse. Assuming the Republican wasn't making a point that a liberal would like, of course.

Afters:

We just finished listening to PolitiFact's Aaron Sharockman spending an hour on the Hugh Hewitt Show. Sharockman reaffirmed the paraphrase of the CBO we quoted above. When a transcript becomes available, we will look at whether Sharockman magnified the distortion from the original fact check.