AHIPpie Shake

by digby

Jonathan Cohn writes that the White House is pushing back on the AHIP “study” with a study of their own:

For the last twenty-four hours or so, analysts and experts have been poking holes in the new study, commissioned by and for the insurance industry, purporting to show that health care reform would raise insurance premiums. But now one of the experts everybody (myself included) has quoted has put together a quick memo showing that, at least for people trying to buy coverage through the new exchanges, premiums would actually come down. Way down. The expert is MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. He hasn’t formally modeled the impacts of the reforms on premiums; for this analysis, he has relied simply on available data from the Congressional Budget Office. But the gist of what he says makes sense intuitively. (As you can imagine, I’m not exactly qualified to pass judgment on the figures.) And while Gruber has advised both the administration and its allies on reform–the White House is circulating this paper–he’s also worked with Republicans and has credibility on both sides of the aisle. His work, in other words, a wee bit more reliable than what the insurance industry put out over the weekend.

Personally, I think that a report put out by my cat would be more reliable than one that was put out by the insurance companies. (And he’s not even an economist.) I find it hard to believe that the press is taking this seriously at all, particularly when there is ample evidence already out there refuting it.

It’s a failure of the news media to put this into the proper perspective, which would entail burying it in paragraph 23 of a story about how the health care exchanges are supposed to work. The report has no credibility — and AHIP should have been told to take out an ad if they wanted to make a big splash. It’s ridiculous that it’s gotten this kind of exposure and discussion.

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