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.

Tchotchkes: The GOP warned you!

Regurgi-state and Rationing

Redstate.com is another conservative website that publishes a lot of items attempting to prove that PolitiFact (PF) is liberally biased. One particular article aimed at PF’s Lie of the Year, the Republican claim that “Obamacare” is a government takeover of healthcare. It used Bryan White’s Sublime Bloviations review of it as most of its support.

It was particularly funny how the writer “Freedoms Truth” (of Austin, Texas—another Weston Hicks?) referred to it without actually quoting it or using it in his own arguments; probably because he had as hard a time “wrapping himself around” Bryan’s sentence construction as everyone else does. He loosely re-words probably the only statement of Bryan’s he could understand, the false choice message that any increased regulation = government takeover.

And again, I have to ask, where the line is drawn as to where the “partially” regulated private sector insurance ends and where government take over begins. I also am told there is no scaled line or measure 1-100%: "Obamacare" is not even close to a single-payer system, medicare for all, or total nationalization. Yet I am supposed to believe they are all one in the same; I suppose it’s due to that black/white only conservative view, with no room for shades of grey.

To quote Freedoms Truth, this is his “truth”:

Many lies have been told about ObamaCare, but most have been told by Obama and the sponsors and supporters. They lied about getting to keep your care (nope, regulations have forced millions to lose coverage they had, from children-only to medicare advantage), lied about the deficit impact (it is going to cost trillions when fully implemented), lied about ‘death panels’ (denied they existed then tweaked the policy on QALY that was in question), lied about alternatives (claimed there was none), lied about constitutionality (denied the fact that Obamacare mandate really is NOT in the Constitution at all and an honest Judge - like happened this week - would rule it unconstitutional).

Let’s take these *lies* one at a time: “They lied about getting to keep your care—nope, regulations have forced millions to lose the coverage they had….” Well, you can’t have it both ways, Freedom. You Republicans have said that illegal immigrants will be covered by “Obamacare”—so they will be covered and not those millions of regular citizens? Sounds like Freedom’s only worry is about the welfare queen getting another limo, so to speak. But he provides no backup to this claim. One would think that the rule (or regulation!) for insurance to include children up to 26 years of age in a family policy would bring in more children, not less. I’m assuming Freedom got this direction from the Republican “Pledge to America” which reads on Page 26: “The Obama Administration has been forced to acknowledge that the new law will force some 87 million Americans to drop their current coverage.” Factcheck.org, another “biased source” (I can’t seem to find any that meets Freedom’s approval except for Heritage.org) reports that this is a misrepresentation.

Lil White Lies: 'Til Death Panel do we part

[Note:  This blog author offers apologies that this review is a little out of order date-wise, it is a PolitiFact fact-check from June.]

According to Wikipedia **The heart of the slippery slope fallacy lies in abusing the intuitively appreciable transitivity of implication, claiming that A lead to B, B leads to C, C leads to D and so on, until one finally claims that A leads to Z. While this is formally valid when the premises are taken as a given, each of those contingencies needs to be factually established before the relevant conclusion can be drawn. Slippery slope fallacies occur when this is not done — an argument that supports the relevant premises is not fallacious and thus isn’t a slippery slope fallacy.**

PolitiFact has fact-checked various versions of this topic many times, starting with their "2009 Lie of the Year,"  Sarah Palin's death panels, as well as on others who are not as much in the public eye as Sarah.  This topic has also been covered by FactCheck.  This particular one was from a video on a website for a candidate by the name of Dan Fanelli who is running against Florida congressman Alan Grayson.