Washington Post Fact Checker Screws Up Facts on Medicare Part C Competitive Bidding

As I wrote recently the fact-checking fad by journalists -- left-wing journalism's attempt to look non partisan as it spews Democratic Party talking points at a faster and faster pace -- has gone over the top.  There is no better example than the September 13 Washington Post (WaPo) fact check of Governor Romney's recent appearance on Meet the Press. The subject being checked was the effectiveness of competitive bidding as being proposed by Romney and Congressman Ryan. (To be fair, you can never tell with these so-called fact checkers. Maybe the fact check was about whether Romney wore the right color tie for TV.)

In the second half of the long horrifically written article¹, WaPo make so many mistakes and misstatements about Medicare Parts C and D as they work today that it would be impossible in a blog post to point them all out.  But WaPo says Romney's basic point is that competitive bidding would work in the future under Wyden-Ryan (or Romney-Ryan or Ryan-Rivlin or...), so what WaPo says about how C and D works currently is irrelevant/

Although it boringly did, WaPo didn't have to go any further than Harvard Professor David Cutler to prove Romney right about competitive bidding.

As WaPo says Ryan isn't proposing benchmarks and rebates (so why did it waste the readers' time with all that BS? Just to confuse readers no doubt).

Not only is Ryan not proposing rebates and benchmarks but Cutler factored rebates out in the figures illustrated above. (And he factored out risk adjustment payments, which cause some of the errors in the C totals WaPo misstated). This research was presented in a recent JAMA article and found that because of competitive bidding:

• multiple private insurers in almost every county in the U.S. theoretically would have delivered insurance as good as -- if not better than -- vanilla traditional Medicare Parts A/B as administered by the MACs² in 2009
• for up to 15% less than the Part A/B MAC system actually did deliver it in 2009
• IF Wyden-Ryan had been the law in 2009. 

  

-- Dennis Byron

¹The first part of the fact check -- as usual -- totally misstates the details of the Wyden-Ryan Medicare Reform Plan.  I am getting sick of the left wing misrepresenting this plan and don't bother doing corrections any more. That's what the left wing is counting on.

² The MACs are all private insurers too but that absolutely is totally ignored by the left wing fact checking community as well as the Democratic Part academics