A Brief History…

By Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R.

Investors Business Daily last week wrote an inaccurate editorial against the health care bill now in Congress, basing its claim on a passage in the bill (PDF) it said would outlaw individual private health insurance. Worse, much of the dextrosphere uncritically passed along the false information.

At first, I first thought IBD had a sensational scoop. But I always like to check things out for myself. IBD didn’t provide a link to the bill, but I found it elsewhere, and read the passage. IANAL, but I am an English major, and the plain reading of the context differed greatly from what IBD said. It was like taking a few words out of a bad movie review, and stringing them together with ellipses to say something completely different.

While a few right-leaning bloggers like Tom Maguire pointed out the error, many others just brushed off criticism of the editorial as ideologically motivated and therefore wrong. They didn’t sufficiently consider that ideological motivation and the correctness of one’s beliefs don’t have to correlate.

The IBD editorial selectively quoted from a passage that defines what “grandfathered” health insurance consists of to make its case.

Here is what IBD wrote:

Under the Orwellian header of “Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage,” the “Limitation On New Enrollment” section of the bill clearly states:

“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.

Now here is a more extended quote from the bill, with the section IBD used bolded:

SEC. 102. PROTECTING THE CHOICE TO KEEP CURRENT COVERAGE.
(a) GRANDFATHERED HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE DEFINED.—Subject to the succeeding provisions of this section, for purposes of establishing acceptable coverage under this division, the term ‘‘grandfathered health insurance coverage’’ means individual health insurance coverage that is offered and in force and effect before the first day of Y1 if the following conditions are met:

(1) LIMITATION ON NEW ENROLLMENT.—
(A) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day of Y1.

As Maguire wrote, the section header, “Grandfathered health insurance defined,” clues the reader in that this is just a definition of what the term means. The part quoted is grammatically dependent on the preceding sentence, which ends in a colon. IBD omitted that information.

To be generous, perhaps the IBD solons who penned the editorial were so excited at finding the supposed smoking gun that they failed to consider that they might have been wrong. This has been known to happen to those looking for evidence of what they “know” to be there. They find it whether or not it actually exists.

When reading complex legislation, and this 1,018-page bill is certainly complex, it’s very easy to be misled. That’s why in such matters it is vitally important to be skeptical of anything that tends to confirm one’s own biases. IBD gives no evidence of having done this.

This major screw-up unhappily illustrates that conservatives can misread reality for political reasons, along with liberals, moderates, Libertarians and everyone else.

Conservatives who decry left-wing media bias, but brush off the IBD debacle are undercutting their own moral authority. I wish they’d just admit IBD was wrong, and go on from there. Obamacare is still a horrid bill, but making factually inaccurate claims will only distract from pointing out why. And someone proven wrong will find it harder to get a sympathetic hearing the next time from the undecided and skeptics.

Liberal blogger Hilzoy said it nicely in words that apply to everyone across the political spectrum (bolded emphasis mine):

“One of the real mistakes many conservatives made, I think, was to dismiss people who disagreed with them. It’s an easy thing to do: by definition, people who disagree with you say things that you think are false, and it’s a short step from ‘false’ to ‘obviously mendacious’, ‘intellectually irresponsible’, ‘flat-out insane’, or something else that means that you just don’t have to take the person in question seriously any more. If you want to keep yourself honest, you should listen to the people who disagree with you.”

(Ironically, Hilzoy failed to follow her own advice in blaming blogger Patterico for swallowing IBD’s mistake, when the post in question was written by another blogger, Karl, on Patterico’s site. Hilzoy didn’t read carefully enough and made a false accusation, precisely what IBD did.)

Listen to the people who disagree with you. And consider the weak points of your preferred position. For example, banning individual private health insurance makes no political sense. Obama, whose popularity is swiftly dropping, has had to promise that people would keep the insurance they have. They do not want a single-payer system. To retract that promise after the bill passes would make congressional Democrats vulnerable in 2010 to voter backlash, which is already building. Democrats may want socialized medicine, but not at the expense of their control of Congress.

Moreover, there’s a more subtle approach to the same end. It makes much more sense to technically keep private health insurance alive, but load it up with so many government mandates that it can’t possibly survive against competition from the federal government, which unlike private companies can make the rules and can print money to pay its bills.

This is how Obama has operated, taking over GM while proclaiming he doesn’t want to do so, running ruinous deficits and saying he doesn’t want to do so. To get single-payer, Obama must discredit the private health care market, and that hasn’t yet happened. Most Americans still like their own health insurance.

This kind of skepticism toward one’s own beliefs is SOP in the science world, where uncritical advocacy is considered bad science. The late Cathy Seipp made this point in a nice profile of the late physicist Richard Feynmann, who neatly described the difference between real science and “cargo-cult science.”

Cathy wrote:

“The title comes, as Feynman explains, from primitive people in the South Seas who’d experienced airplanes landing with useful things during World War II and wanted this to happen again.

“For years afterward, they would station a man in a wooden hut next to an abandoned runway, with wooden pieces on his ears like headphones and bamboo sticking out like an antenna. But even though he looked just like an air-traffic controller, and fires burned as guide lights just like they did before, still no planes came.

“And the one feature Feynman noticed is missing from all cargo-cult science is what he calls ‘a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to…a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it.’ ”

Leaning over backwards to consider how one might be wrong is not only good advice for science, but for journalism and politics. Too bad IBD decided to opt for cargo-cult science. Conservatives need to learn from its mistake.

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This is the personal opinion of Bradley J. Fikes, and does not necessarily reflect the view of his employer, the North County Times.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 9:52 am and is filed under health reform, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.