Lil White Lies: The Thief Shouting Robber

Eric Levine of the blog Content in Reality correctly analyzed the “professed bias” of Bryan White and Jeff Dyberg’s blog PolitiFact Bias with a story about two dogs he named Rex and Dex:

One could theoretically argue that one political party has made a disproportionately higher number of false claims than the other, and that this is subsequently reflected in the distribution of ratings on the PolitiFact site. However, there is no evidence offered by PolitiFact that this is their calculus in decision-making." Yet they don't look for evidence that their [PolitiFact Bias’] explanation is the better one. To show the fallacy in this kind of thinking, let me present an analogy: Let's say i have two dogs that roam free in my house all day, Rex and Dex. I come home one day to find my couch clawed to pieces. I cannot find evidence that Rex did it, so I assume Dex did it (even though I found no evidence specifically pointing to Dex). This is exactly the same fallacy they employ. They don't specifically have evidence of a Republican tendency towards falsehoods so they assume it must be a Politifact tendency towards liberal bias. Like I noted earlier, the article did not randomly chose articles.

So to extend Levine’s canine example of Rex and Dex, it can be applied likewise to the logic that Grading PolitiFact employs when poster Bryan White says that Pat Boone’s statement about Medicare “rationing care to pay for wasteful spending” cannot possibly be Pants on Fire false as determined by PolitiFact, but “somewhat accurate when considered objectively.”

Republican "Death Panel"

Let’s say one of my older kids brings home two dogs, one named Rex from Red’s Pets and one named Dex from Blue’s Pets. I find that both dogs have fleas, but Rex has fleas and a bit of mange. I can see they both have had the infestations for a while. I go visit Red’s Pets and before telling him the problems with Rex I admit I’ve been to Blue’s Pets. The owner of Red’s Pets (Red) proclaims,” you don’t want to buy a dog at Blue’s Pets, they all have fleas.”

In this statatement from Red, the implication is that his dogs don’t have them. Yet Rex is actually in worse shape than Dex. Yes, Blue’s pets have fleas, but is Red’s statement a credible one?

In this case, Pat Boone is the owner of Red’s Pets. ALL the dogs have fleas—and his dogs have not just fleas but mange, but he’s telling you only his competitors’ dogs have fleas as if his dogs didn't.

Taken in context, it’s clear Pat Boone was fear mongering seniors about their Medicare, and not only that, misleading them about the alternative (to both Medicare and "wasteful spending"), which was worse….much worse.

Grading PolitiFact author Bryan White’s problem is that he does not (or refuses to) recognize that rationing exists systemically for any scarce resource, and that America’s method of rationing healthcare is very poor given what we spend as a percentage of GDP. ACA is meant to ration….more rationally, but not in the context Pat Boone was conveying.

The healthcare market is NOT a free market. It is similar to a utility: the supply is severely constricted (as one of my economics professors told my class, the most powerful union in the world is the AMA) and everyone is compelled to use it, especially in an emergency. While American healthcare in general is rationed by employment and cost, Medicare is rationed by age and price (and employment through retirement benefits): Simply put, Medicare Part A is major medical, which pays 80%, and is “free” once one reaches the age of 65, Part B is for outpatient services, for which a monthly premium is required (now about $100 monthly). Medicare pays 80% over a deductible; which means, for most people, a “Medi-Gap” insurance policy must be purchased (or is provided as an employer benefit) to cover the other 20%.

The issue with Pat Boone’s stating that a board will ration care is not just the context in which it was used, but the “pot calling the kettle black” (the Thief shouting Robber) implications of it. Unfortunately, the IPAB  provides the Republicans an easy target at which it can shoot criticisms. The systemic rationing of healthcare is often also referred to as “covert” which makes it easy to pretend that it didn’t exist until a board of experts was created with ACA to recommend cost containment measures.

Recall what happened last year when Paul Ryan came up with a plan “to end Medicare as we know it” (PolitiFact’s 2011 Lie of the Year). It basically turned Medicare over to the insurance companies and gave people what amounted to insurance discount coupons (“premium support”). Systemically, there is no doubt that this would be a much more drastic rationing method (some estimate as many as 1 million additional people would be removed from the Medicare rolls, i.e., denied treatment), and obviously people caught on as complaints mounted, and Ryan quietly re-drew the plan to “include” Medicare as we have it today.

Truth Index: PolitiFact's Male Selection Bias?

Eric Levine’s blog Content in Reality gave me another variable to measure my database of PolitiFact rulings, which should have been obvious, although I had not really given it a thought before. Maybe it was because of my bleeding heart liberal need to be politically correct. Well heck with that.

He graciously responded to some comments I gave him on his blog concerning the availability of my database, with the pertinent portion for this post:

I will suggest one really important point I made on a previous post about the question over Politifact's ratings meaning republicans lie more or if there is selection bias:

"First off, notice that Politifact has never had an overall Dem vs GOP report card. Ostermeier was the one who did this. So this means that certain conclusions one may be tempted to draw from Ostermeier's study are not ones people may necessarily draw from Politifact itself. This is because all Ostermeier did was total up all statements made by Democrats and Republicans, and compared them. Of course he could have easily done the same with any arbitrary breakdown of statements: Men versus women, majorities versus minorities, southerners versus northerners, etc... If we found similar disparities in the data to the Dem vs GOP data, would we be accusing them of covering "political discourse with a frame that suggests this is the case?”...

I never assigned a variable key for men versus women, etc., because I thought it was not appropriate. But I realized in reading all of Levine’s enlightened writing along with his commentary responding to my conservative counterpart’s “trolling” that it would not be too difficult a matter to assign the male versus female variable to my data: the only time-consuming task would be to make sure gender-neutral names (like Pat, Chris or Alex) are assigned correctly. I didn’t check every every last one, but I know I’m very close. So here it is: of 3,989 rulings through the end of 2011 for individuals, 642 or 16% (1/6) of the rulings were on females. The Truth-o-Meter app breaks down like this:

Click to enlarge:  The Truth-o-Meter male to female looks close to identical except for the Pants on Fire.

At first glance, it looks like on a percentage basis the Truth Index categories are all quite close. But if you read across from True to Pants on Fire, the female percentages are very slightly lower going all the way to Pants on Fire—where it’s about 3 points higher than the males. On a percentage basis, the female Pants on Fire Percentage is almost 50% (45% to be exact) higher than the males (9.3% versus 6.4%).

But what about the Truth Index—in terms of Republican males and females and Democrat males and females, and those of neither party? Here’s how that looks:

Click to enlarge:  Boys are blue and girls are pink:  Pretty close except for Republican girls.

The indexes across the board fell within a fairly close range with the exception of the Republican females who had the worst Truth Index approaching a “Mostly False” negative 50. And when one thinks of PF Pants on Fire and Republican women, the one outlying outliar who immediately comes to mind is “PolitiFact came out and said everything I said was true” Michele Bachmann.

So, just for sh*ts and giggles, if you back out Bachmann’s rulings, you improve the Republican female average to a negative 39.47. That’s only five points but look at it this way. The percentage of Pants on Fire rulings for Females in total drops from 9.3% to 8.1%, dropping the percentage difference between Pants on Fire for Males to about 27% higher instead of the overall 45% higher. In other words, a lot of bad rulings on one person can have a very large affect on the rulings as a group.

Conclusions? In the same way that my conservative counterpart strains to prove that PolitiFact selects statements with a liberal bias, can it be said from this that they select them with a male bias as well? Indeed, this can almost be seen as a good example of how difficult any bias would be to prove if it indeed existed, as well as the conspiratorial, absurd nature of the “liberal” selection bias claim. To put it in Levine’s words, with this “arbitrary breakdown” I have done, should PolitiFact be “accused of covering political discourse with a frame that suggests” gender bias? I think not.