More on Charles Gaba's "Two glaring errors in the WSJ anti-Obamacare editorial"

Charles Gaba has caught a couple of glaring errors in a Wall Street Journal editorial claiming that the ACA private plan marketplace is on the road to failure. The most important error misrepresents the state of the current and potential nongroup market -- that is, the pool of people who buy or could buy their health insurance on their own, with or without ACA subsidies.

Gaba captures the main point: that contra WSJ assertions, most of those who buy their insurance off-exchange are not subsidy eligible, and are mingled in the same risk pools as those who buy on-exchange. I'd like to further clarify, though, how much progress those markets have made toward full capacity, and to what extent those who are eligible for subsidies have so far enrolled.

Here's the WSJ editorial board's "state of the market" overview:

The Wall Street Journal's narrow view of narrow networks

I have see-sawed back and forth between respect for the Wall Street Journal's healthcare reporters and intimations that WSJ coverage of the Affordable Care Act has been skewed toward the negative.

Today's front-page story by Timothy Martin on the prevalence of "narrow networks" in plans offered on the ACA exchanges certainly emphasizes the negative -- without adequate context, in my view.

First, consider the broader context. News this weekend was full of "ACA signup surge" headlines: 1.1 million people have enrolled in plans via HealthCare.gov, and about 2 million overall have enrolled in ACA plans when state exchange totals (not yet fully tallied for the pre-Christmas surge) are added in.  That's well off original projections but signals a significant recovery and acceleration. Today's front-page Journal story is the first since these numbers came in, and mentions them only in passing.

Fair enough, perhaps. The story is about "narrow networks" -- ACA plans that exclude access to many doctors and hospitals within the coverage area. The narrative is built on a McKinsey study finding that 70% of silver plans offered on the ACA exchanges are "narrow" or "ultranarrow" as defined by the study: offering access to fewer than 14 hospitals.

WSJ hits ACA from the left

Good reporters at the Wall Street Journal continue to bust the ACA's chops.  The likes of Louise Radnofsky, Amy Schatz, Timothy Martin and now Leslie Scism, who's been covering insurance for at least 15 years (and is also a news editor), are not going to get their facts wrong. But it remains fair to wonder whether the Murdoch-era news editorial regime is shaping the stories' emphasis [UPDATE: I have spoken to someone at the Journal, whose word I trust, who assures me that editors area not imposing a political agenda on reporters. I regret speculating about motive without information.]

Today, Scism and Martin spotlight something that has in truth troubled me as I explore offerings on HealthCare.gov and ValuePenguin:  the prevalence of high deductibles, particularly in bronze plans:

As enrollment picks up on the HealthCare.gov website, many people with modest incomes are encountering a troubling element of the federal health law: deductibles so steep they may not be able to afford the portion of medical expenses that insurance doesn't cover.
The average individual deductible for what is called a bronze plan on the exchange—the lowest-priced coverage—is $5,081 a year, according to a new report on insurance offerings in 34 of the 36 states that rely on the federally run online marketplace.

The WSJ on the ACA, cont.

Early this month, I looked at a couple of Wall Street Journal stories that emphasized the negative in the Affordable Care Act rollout and wondered whether the WSJ healthcare coverage wasn't Foxifying a bit. One emphasized the premium hike for a relatively small subset of people subject to the individual mandate (and without employer-provided insurance), and one aggregated and exaggerated a series of "blows" to the law, most of which were old news.

Healthcare reporter Louise Radnofsky was on both bylines. She's a good reporter. Her coverage over time has been balanced.*

But as the rollout of the ACA exchanges looms, I wonder whether WSJ news editing is tilting the emphasis on ACA coverage generally [ [UPDATE: I have spoken to someone at the Journal, whose word I trust, who assures me that editors area not imposing a political agenda on reporters. I regret speculating about motive without information.].

Today, Project Millennial blogger Mike Miesen flags another questionable WSJ framing of ACA news that had also registered with me this morning:

Eloquent omission, Damian Paletta

I approve this messaging from the WSJ reporter on federal budgeting matters:

And while the short-term deficit is shrinking, both parties know it is projected to widen dramatically in coming decades as the U.S. population ages unless changes are made to curb the growth of programs like Medicare.

Conspicuous in its absence from this long-term budget snapshot: Social Security.  Again, later in the article:

Many Democrats have called for a broad budget deal that would reduce the deficit over many years by raising taxes and curbing the growth of Medicare and other entitlement spending.

From what planet comes this one?

This headline, that is, or rather large caption to a front-page photo in today's Wall Street Journal (not onine):

Shooting Mars Swearing-in Ceremony

The photo [scroll down] is of a man lying flat with a gun pointed at his head. I did wonder whether someone was shooting an action movie set on the red planet. Its sandwiching between two gerunds (or a gerund and a gerund phrase, or whatever) added to the red fog.

Add this to my collection of headlines in which it's hard to pluck the verb from a dense mesh of (often monosyllabic) ambidextrous verb-nouns:

Verbal noun mashup dazes headline reader
Newspaper taxes readers' decoding chops
Five noun run spurs brain freeze

The perceptual alchemy wrought by chained-CPI

As I noted once before, Obama is getting a lot of rhetorical mileage (for whatever that's worth) out of adding chained-CPI to his 2014 budget. Here's Damian Paletta's lede in the Wall Street Journal's account of the unveiling:

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama's $3.778 trillion spending proposal for next year incorporates for the first time a number of measures to slow the growth of spending on Social Security, Medicare and other federal benefits, hoping to draw Senate Republicans to the table for negotiations.

Obama's 2013 budget contained virtually all these "measures to slow...growth" except chained-CPI. But apparently, the grab-bag of nips and tucks to Medicare, Medicaid, federal employee benefits and other mandatory spending did not qualify as "a number of measures" until chained-CPI alchemized them.

To boost the impression of a sea change, Paletta cites one entitlement cut that's been significantly boosted over last year's budget proposal:

The White House also proposed about $370 billion in cuts over 10 years to Medicare, the health-care program for close to 50 million seniors. Almost half of these reductions would come from lower payments to drug companies, but the budget would raise $50 billion through higher premiums for some recipients over 10 years, much more than previously proposed. 

Last year's budget included about $350 billion in cuts to government healthcare spending, most of them from Medicare.  And it proposed $28 billion in higher Medicare Parts B and D premiums for wealthier benefits. The boost this year to $50 billion is substantial, but hardly game-changing.

Compare the 2014 premium boost:

Who's more scared of the sequester?

Since the limited fiscal cliff deal was struck, there's naturally been a ton of speculation whether the Republicans will indulge in a fresh round of debt ceiling terrorism when the treasury reaches the end of its rope in a couple of months, and whether Obama will blink if they do.

In a Wall Street Journal interview, John Boehner indicated that the debt ceiling may play more of a support role, and that the sequestered spending cuts postponed for just two months by the Jan. 1 agreement are the GOP's main source of leverage. Here's how he sketched out his alleged negotiating strategy, as recounted by the WSJ's Stephen Moore:

The real showdown will be on the debt ceiling and the spending sequester in March. I ask Mr. Boehner if he will take the debt-ceiling talks to the brink—risking a government shutdown and debt downgrade from the credit agencies—given that it didn't work in 2011 and President Obama has said he won't bargain on the matter.

The debt bill is "one point of leverage," Mr. Boehner says, but he also hedges, noting that it is "not the ultimate leverage." He says that Republicans won't back down from the so-called Boehner rule: that every dollar of raising the debt ceiling will require one dollar of spending cuts over the next 10 years. Rather than forcing a deal, the insistence may result in a series of monthly debt-ceiling increases.

The Republicans' stronger card, Mr. Boehner believes, will be the automatic spending sequester trigger that trims all discretionary programs—defense and domestic. It now appears that the president made a severe political miscalculation when he came up with the sequester idea in 2011.

The liberal Reagan of the Wall Street Journal's imagining

Democrats worried that Obama will get rolled in the looming debt ceiling/sequester fight might turn to the right wing commentariat for comfort.  To his enemies, he now bestrides Capitol Hill like a colossus while the GOP leadership walks under his huge legs and peeps about to find themselves dishonorable graves.

I don't think they're right. But I find it refreshing.  Bracing. You might almost say exhilarating. Start with Charles Krauthammer:

The rout was complete, the retreat disorderly. President Obama got his tax hikes — naked of spending cuts — passed by the ostensibly Republican House of Representatives... now that he’s past the post, he’s free to be himself — a committed big-government social democrat...

From AEI, one more weak whack at TPC's debunk of Romney's tax reform "plan"

Ever since the Tax Policy Center exposed the plain fact that Romney's proposal to render a 20% cut in marginal income tax rates "revenue neutral" with unspecified tax loophole closures without raising taxes on the middle class is mathematically impossible, GOP apologists have taken serial attempts to square the circle and fill in the blanks that Romney refuses to fill in.

First, the Wall Street Journal editorial board attempted a laughable debunk, which relied mainly on assuming that the rate cut would stimulate fantastic growth rates-- the old voodoo economics assumption.  As I pointed out at the time, the TPC had already granted Romney the most generous "dynamic scoring" (projections building in the assumption that the plan would spur growth) that any reality-based economist would grant.

The Wall Street Journal editorialists rush in where Romney fears to tread

The true believers in supply-side economics on the Wall Street Journal editorial board long for a policy debate that Romney is determined to avoid:

the one thing [Romney's speech] didn't do constitutes a major political gamble. Neither he nor the entire GOP convention made a case for his economic policy agenda. He and Paul Ryan promised to help the middle class, but they never explained other than in passing how they would do it.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Romney tossed out his five policy ideas almost as an afterthought. Energy got one sentence, education scored big with two. Neil Armstrong received almost as much speech time as what Mr. Romney would do specifically to spur faster growth and raise middle-class incomes.

Mitt Romney, taxer of muni bonds?

Oh, the distortions, sleights of hand and outright falsehoods in the Wall Street Journal editorial board's ridiculous attempt to take down the Brookings/Urban League Tax Policy Center finding that the Romney tax plan would cut taxes for the wealthiest 5% and raise them for everyone else.  The falsehoods are macro, micro and legion.

Let's start with the premises on which the TPC analysis of Romney's purposefully vague tax plan (p. 38 ff) are based. Because Romney does not specify what tax deductions he would reduce or eliminate, or for whom, TPC extrapolates from broad principles he's laid out:

Broccoli-robbed! The Wall Street Journal's beef with John Roberts

In the wake of Chief Justice John Roberts' division of the mandate baby, the Wall Street Journal editorial board laments:

From now on, Congress can simply regulate interstate commerce by imposing "taxes" whenever someone does or does not do something contrary to its desires.

That's true!  Also on target is the editorialists' complaint against Roberts' sleight-of-hand (which I noted myself on Saturday):

[Roberts] also temporizes that "taxes that seek to influence conduct are nothing new."

True enough, but the punishments in the tax code for inactivity come in the form of not being able to claim benefits that Congress in its graces bestows. Such as: If you don't borrow to buy a home, you don't get a mortgage interest deduction.

Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty.

 This reality-based analysis, however, serves a fantasy:

The reality is that Washington would love to regulate the ordinary economic choices that used to be beyond its purview, and now it will be able to abuse the ad hoc "tax" permit that the Chief Justice has given it.

Customer Relationship Management, Murdoch style

Print publications, as everyone knows, have been hurting for some time, and many resort to revenue boosters as desperate as those of broke cities looking to jack up parking violation revenue.  For years, I've held off from tempting 1-year offers from the Economist because they won't let you pay by check -- they want your credit card for automatic renewal. I can accept a reasonable bump-up when a new subscriber offer expires, but I don't want it to be unilateral.

For arrogance and customer manipulation, though, nothing beats The Wall Street Journal in the Murdoch era. My online subscription just expired, and when I tried to click through to an article I was bumped to a subscribe page offering a decent combined print-and-online rate ($5.99/week). It's a great time for me to renew, I figured, because my credit card expires in August. I filled out my credit card info, but never pulled the trigger. The terms are unacceptable on several counts.

First, the fee is billed weekly, so they'd be coming after me for my new credit card info right away. Worse is what they do with it.  This offer was dangled before me, an existing online customer, as an "introductory" one -- which makes partial sense, as I have not subscribed to the print edition for some time.  At page bottom, however, is this caveat:

Obama through the looking glass(es)

Obama is a radical socialist who vastly increased government spending, saddled our grandchildren with debt and expanded government control of every aspect of Americans' lives.

Obama is a naive weakling who let Republicans frame the agenda in 2011, was seduced by a siren song of compromise, and capitulated to the Tea Party hostage-takers, agreeing to massive spending cuts without winning any revenue increases. 

I'd like to accuse Republicans of the doublethink required to embrace both narratives, but they never really bought into the second -- at best, they projected "weak Obama" onto the foreign policy stage (a bit of a stretch in light of Obama's apparent 'got the sucker' lethality, whatever you think of the wisdom of his various covert and low-key military operations). The capitulator-in-chief narrative belongs to disappointed progressives.

Still, given the Rube Goldberg two-stroke spending cut apparatus that Obama signed onto on August 1 this year, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the Wall Street Journal editorialists' lump-of-coal lament today:

How the Journal editorialists measure Murdoch

Felix Salmon and Joe Nocera have effectively exposed the moral bankruptcy of the Wall Street Journal editorial board's aggressive defense of Murdoch and News Corp.  But leaving aside the apologists' they-did-it-toos and  it-wasn't-so-bads and we-know-our-boss-for-an-honest-man modes of denial, let's focus for a moment on the editorial board's expression of its true credo (my emphasis):

Our readers can decide if we are a better publication than we were four years ago, but there is no denying that News Corp. has invested in the product. The news hole is larger. Our foreign coverage in particular is more robust, our weekend edition more substantial, and our expansion into digital delivery ahead of the pack. The measure that really matters is the market's, and on that score Mr. Hinton was at the helm when we again became America's largest daily.

To be fair, this market fundamentalism from the Journal's opinion wing long predates the Murdoch takeover.  In an odd way, it suggests good faith in their defense of bad faith practices The market was measure for every scandal the Journal editorialists explain away even as the paper's top-notch reporters were breaking them. They pooh-poohed, in turn, the equity research scandal, the options back payments scandal, the insurance broker kickback scandal, and the subprime mortgage scandal. They were relentless in defense of corrupt investment bankers and analysts, corrupt insurance brokers, corrupt top executives and boards, and corrupt mortgage underwriters.

Reconciliation explanation fail, cont.

Recently Jonathan Chait called out The New York Times for failing to spell out that the Democrats are not trying to pass their whole health care bill through reconciliation, but rather to use reconciliation to "patch" the Senate bill:

Now that they've lost the ability to break a filibuster, Democrats plan to have the House pass the Senate bill, and then use reconciliation to enact changes to the Senate bill demanded by the House. These changes -- higher subsidy levels, different kinds of taxes to pay for them, nixing the Nebraska Medicaid deal -- mainly involve taxes and spending. In other words, they're exactly the kinds of policies that are well-suited for reconciliation.

It's not just The Hill that misses the distinction, but the whole political media. Here's Sunday's New York Times:

Many Democrats in Congress said they doubted that it was feasible to pass a major health care bill with a parliamentary tool called reconciliation, which is used to speed adoption of budget and tax legislation. Reconciliation requires only 51 votes for passage in the Senate, but entails procedural and political risks.

Again, using reconciliation to patch up the Senate bill is a totally different thing than using it to pass an entire health care bill. I can understand why Republicans would treat them as identical -- they're spinning for partisan purposes. Reporters covering this issue have no good excuse.

Today, it's The Wall Street Journal that fails in this basic bit of exposition in its report on Obama's health care proposal:

Bad call of the month

WSJ, 1/15/2010

Volcker Voices his Views in a Vacum

Paul Volcker is talking. But is anyone listening? [snip]

The two speeches highlighted Mr. Volcker's predicament. Having been viewed as a crucial supporter of Mr. Obama during his presidential run, he appears to have diminishing influence in the White House. And while revered by Wall Street critics on the left and right, his most deeply held views are having limited influence among policy makers.

"It's clear that the ideas Paul Volcker is pushing now are not shared by the administration," said Douglas Elliott, an economic studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public-policy organization. Given the difficulty of hiving off bank-lending units from their trading operations, adds Mr. Elliott, "I agree with the administration on that one."

Obama, 1/21:

... I’m proposing a simple and common- sense reform, which we’re calling the Volcker rule, after this tall guy behind me. Banks will no longer be allowed to own, invest or sponsor hedge funds, private-equity funds or proprietary trading operations for their own profit, unrelated to serving their customers.

Actually, the Journal had a story  a few weeks ago which, while noting that Volcker's main ideas had not become Administration policy, also reported that Volcker was methodically, patiently building support for them. But WSJ online l has so eviscerated its search engine in the Murdoch era (and ditto for Factiva as offered through the Journal subscription) that I can't find it.

Verbal noun mash-up dazes headline reader

Quick: decode this WSJ headline:

New Breast Screening Limits Face Reversal

A headline as dense as my compost heap! Am I confused because references to body parts distract the attention, or because the headline strings together four words in a row that are either verbs or verbal nouns (five, if you count "breast," as in "breast the waves"), or because "facing a reversal" is inherently paradoxical, or because after reading the apparent subject phrase "new breast screening" it's very difficult not to read "limits" as a verb (rather than as the completion of the subject phrase)?
I'd have to say my confusion is overdetermined.

P.S. the political backlash to the public health finding that women in their forties don't need yearly mammograms is a perfect microcosm of the dysfunctions of both our political and health care systems.

More on this score:
From what planet comes this one?
Verbal noun mashup dazes headline reader
Newspaper taxes readers' decoding chops
Five noun run spurs brain freeze

Obama re-gifts a campaign candygram to Business Roundtable

This gesture from Obama to the Business Roundtable, reported in today's WSJ, should surprise no one:

Pressed on his proposal to rein in the indefinite deferral of corporate taxes on overseas earnings, Mr. Obama said he would be willing to consider lowering the 35% corporate tax rate as he closes other business-tax loopholes. "That's a very appealing conversation to me, and I'd like to pursue it," the president said.

On June 17, 2008, Obama told the Wall Street Journal:

On the corporate side, for example, one of the things I've asked my folks to look at is: Are there ways we can close existing loopholes in tax havens at the same time as we're lowering overall rates? We've got this new problem: The biggest problem with our tax code when it comes to the business side is that we have one of the highest tax rates -- corporate tax rates -- on paper but our effective tax rate is one of the lowest … You know, how much you pay in taxes as a corporation a lot of times is going to depend on how good your lobbyist is, as opposed to any sound economic theories. So those distorting effects I'd like to actually remove and eliminate from our tax system, but obviously that's a complicated and difficult task. The last time we did it was in 1986. We're going to have to, I think, revisit that.

I believe he said as much in debate with McCain, who had made lowering the corporate rate a central campaign plank: that lowering the rate would make sense if there weren't such a huge spread between the nominal corporate tax rate and what companies actually pay.

So once again, Obama showcases his willingness to compromise in a high profile forum without actually giving anything away.