Fact Fudging

One of the reasons an insurance-industry group is taking so much heat over its controversial report stating health reform will raise individual premiums is that it fudged the truth—and got caught.

Of course Democrats were going to tear apart the industry-funded research released just before the Senate Finance Committee voted on a reform bill this week. That was to be expected. Normally, the business group, America's Health Insurance Plans, would stand by its study and the public is left to decide who's right.

But a funny thing happened. The study's author, PricewaterhouseCoopers, issued a statement saying that AHIP instructed it to ignore aspects of the reform plan—like government subsidies to help pay for insurance—that could offset factors that raise premiums. In other words, Pricewaterhouse admitted it was told to cherry-pick to serve the insurers' interests.

“The reform packages under consideration have other provisions that we have not included in this analysis," the Pricewaterhouse statement reads. "We have not estimated the impact of the new subsidies on the net insurance cost to households. Also, if other provisions in health care reform are successful in lowering costs over the long term, those improvements would offset some of the impacts we have estimated.”

Ouch.

If this sounds like "I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here," you're right. It's not like this doesn't happen all the time when special interests push an agenda in Washington. The difference is you don't usually see a mea culpa like the Pricewaterhouse statement.

The Associated Press did a story on the insurers' study Sunday. And AHIP included favorable passages from the AP story on its blog to help sell the validity of its own arguments. Today, the AP has a story that takes a different tone. Here's the lead: "In its assaults on a Democratic health care overhaul bill, the insurance industry uses facts selectively and mixes accurate assertions with misleading spin and an embrace of worst-case scenarios."

Likewise, the two most active fact-checking organizations, PolitiFact.com and FactCheck.org, are all over the study.

"It makes for a pretty easy day of fact-checking when the very authors of a less-than-thorough analysis of a bill come out and say, 'You know, that study wasn’t exactly thorough,'" FactCheck.org said in its analysis.

The lesson here: If you're going to play the Washington fact-fudging game, don't get caught red-handed.