Thursday, March 30, 2017

Hewitt v. PolitiFact: Two facts clearly favor Hewitt

Over the past week, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt claimed on Sunday the health insurance industry has entered a "death spiral," PolitiFact rated Hewitt's claim "False" and Hewitt had PolitiFact Executive Director Aaron Sharockman on his radio show for an hour long interview (transcript here).

Aside from the central dispute over the "death spiral," where PolitiFact's work arguably commits a bifurcation fallacy, we have identified two areas where Hewitt has the right of the argument. PolitiFact has published (and superficially defended) false statements in both areas.

The New York Times article

PunditFact (PolitiFact):
Hewitt referred to a New York Times article that quotes the president of Aetna saying that in many places people will lose health care insurance.

We couldn’t find that article, but a simple remark on how premiums are rising and insurers are leaving the marketplace is not enough evidence to meet the actuarial definition of a death spiral.
We found the article in just a few minutes (it was dead easy; see hit No. 5). Two quotations from it will show it matches the content, other than the term "president," that Hewitt described on his Sunday television appearance.

One:
Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini has pronounced the ACA's health insurance markets in a "death spiral."
Two:
___

This story has been corrected to show that consumers have reduced options, not that some consumers have no health care options.
So we have the "death spiral" comment from the head of AETNA that Hewitt described, as well as the dire statement that some people have no options, though that part was reported in error in the AP story that appeared in the Times.

During his radio interview, Sharockman tried to pin on Hewitt PolitiFact's failure to find the described Times story and flatly said the article was not in the Times:
AS: You said the president of Aetna. It’s the chairman and CEO, and it was not in the New York Times, as you also know. It was originally probably in the Wall Street Journal.
The article was in The New York Times, and we have informed PolitiFact writer Allison Graves (via Twitter) and Sharockman (via email).

We expect ethical journalists to make appropriate corrections.

Where does the CBO stand on the "death spiral"?

The mainstream media widely interpreted the CBO report addressing President Trump's health care proposal as a judgment the ACA has not entered a "death spiral."

PolitiFact did likewise in its fact check of Hewitt:
CBO, independent analysis: No death spiral
Others have also concluded that the Affordable Care Act 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.
Though PolitiFact did not link to the CBO report in its fact check (contrary to PolitiFact's statement of standards), we believe the claim traces to this CBO report, which contains this assessment (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.
Note the CBO report does not call the insurance market "stable" under the ACA. Instead it projects that insurance markets will probably remain stable in most areas. Assuming PolitiFact has no better support from the CBO than the portion we have quoted, we find PolitiFact's version a perversion of the original. The CBO statement leaves open the possibility of a death spiral.

Sharockman stood behind the fact check's apparent spin during his appearance on the Hugh Hewitt Show:
AS: Hugh, you’re misleading the listeners.

HH: …is that we have gone from 7…

AS: You’re misleading the listeners. The same CBO report that you’re quoting said that the markets are stable whether it’s the AHCA…
Again, unless Sharockman has some version of a CBO report different from what we have found, we judge that Sharockman and PolitiFact are misleading people about the content of the report.

We used email to point out the discrepancy to Sharockman and asked him to provide support for his and PolitiFact's interpretation of the CBO report.

We will update this article if we receive a response from Sharockman that includes such evidence.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

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.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Rorschach context

It seems as though the liberal bloggers (aka "mainstream fact checkers") at PolitiFact treat context like a sort of Rorschach inkblot, to interpret as they see fit.

What evidence prompts these unkind words? The evidence runs throughout PolitiFact's history, but two recent fact-checks inspired the imagery.

The PolitiFact Florida Lens

In our previous post, we pointed out the preposterous "Mostly True" rating PolitiFact Florida gifted on a Florida Democrat who equated the raw gender wage gap with the gender wage gap caused by sex discrimination. The fact checkers did not interpret words uttered in context, "simply because she isn't a man," as an argument that the raw wage gap was entirely the result of gender discrimination. Perhaps it wasn't specific enough, like saying the difference in pay occurred despite doing the same work ("Mostly False")?

Whatever the case, PolitiFact opted not to accept a crystal clear clue that it was checking a claim that mirrored one it had previously rated "Mostly False" and rated the similar claim "Mostly True."

The PolitiFact California Lens

A recent fact check from PolitiFact California makes for a jarring contrast with the PolitiFact Florida item.

California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom tweeted that Republican Jason Chaffetz had treated (07-12-2018) compared the cost of an iPhone to the cost of health care "as if the 2 are the same." Newsom was making the point that health care costs more than an iPhone, so saying the two are the same misses the mark by a California mile.

But did Chaffetz say the costs are the same?

First let's look at how the PolitiFact California lens processed the evidence, then we'll put that evidence together with some surrounding context.

PolitiFact California:
We also examined Newsom’s final claim that Chaffetz had compared the iPhone and health care costs "as if they are the same."

Chaffetz’ comments, particularly his phrase "Americans have choices. And they’ve got to make a choice," leave the impression that obtaining health care is as simple as sacrificing the purchase of a smartphone.
It's worth noting at the outset that PolitiFact California's key evidence doesn't mention the iPhone and does not even imply any type of cost comparison. The only way to adduce Chaffetz's quotation as evidence of a price comparison would have to come from the context of Chaffetz's remarks. And a fact-checker ought to explain to readers how that works, unless the fact checker can count on his audience sharing his ideological bias.

Chaffetz (as quoted at length in the PolitiFact California fact check; bold emphasis added):
"Well we're getting rid of the individual mandate. We're getting rid of those things that people said they don't want. And you know what? Americans have choices. And they've got to make a choice. And so, maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest it in their own health care. They've got to make those decisions for themselves."
Chaffetz in no way offers anything approaching a clear suggestion that the cost of an iPhone equals the cost of health care or health insurance. His words about people having choices come right after he says the health care bill would eliminate the individual mandate. After that comes the mention of an iPhone costing "hundreds of dollars" that one might instead invest in health care. In context, the statement is just one example of a great number of choices one might make about paying for health care.

The PolitiFact California lens (like magic!) turns Chaffetz's words conveniently into what is needed to say the Democrat said something "Mostly True."

It's the bias, stupid.

We have PolitiFact Florida ignoring clear context to give a Democrat a more favorable rating than she deserves. We have PolitiFact California finding clear evidence from the context where none exists to give a Democrat a more favorable rating than he deserves.

Point out the absurdity to PolitiFact (as we did for the PolitiFact Florida flub) and somebody from the Tampa Bay Times will read the critique and no changes to the article will result.
How are they able to repeatedly overlook problems like these?

The simplest explanation? Because they're biased. Biased to the left. Biased to trust their own work (despite the incongruity with other PolitiFact fact checks!). And Dunning-Kruger out the wazoo.


Clarification: March 27, 2017: Added link to the PolitiFact California fact check of Gavin Newsom.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

There You Go Again: PolitiFact Florida makes a hash of another gender wage gap ruling

Though PolitiFact is an unreliable fact-checker, at least one can bank on the mainstream fact-checker's ability to flub gender wage gap claims.

We hit PolitiFact on this issue often, but this latest one from PolitiFact Florida is a doozy, rivaling PolitiFact Oregon's remarkable turd from 2014.

Drum roll: PolitiFact Florida, March 14, 2017:

We're presenting a big hunk of the fact check as it appears at PolitiFact Florida to show how PolitiFact Florida effectively contradicts its own reasoning.

In the next-to-last paragraph of its summary, PolitiFact Florida explains that "differences in pay can be affected by the careers women and men choose and taking time off to care for children." Those aren't the only factors affecting the raw wage gap, by the way.

Yet in the ironically named "Share The Facts" version, the "Mostly True" rating blares its message aside Democrat Patricia Farley's claim the disparities occur purely based on gender ("simply because she isn't a man"). In other words, the cause is gender discrimination, not different job choices and the like--directly contradicting PolitiFact Florida's caveat. Farley didn't just leave out context. She explicitly denied the key bit of context.

Anyone who knows the difference between the raw gender wage gap and the wage gap based solely on gender discrimination but uses the large former gap in the context of arguing for legislation to reduce gender discrimination is deceiving people. The raw gender wage gap is not a realistic representation of gender discrimination in wages because of other factors, such as men and women tending to choose careers that pay differently.

So, yes, we're saying that unless Patricia Farley is ignorant about the difference between the gender wage gap and the wage gap caused by pay discrimination, she is lying, as in deliberately deceiving her audience. And PolitiFact Florida is calling her falsehood and potentially intentional deception "Mostly True."

The PolitiFact Florida wage gap fact check is below average for PolitiFact--and that's like failing to leap over a match box.


Correction March 15, 2017: Posted the intended URL for the PolitiFact Florida fact check. We had mistakenly used the URL to a related fact check concerning Donald Trump.