NYT does "he said"/"she said" on SCHIP

How hard is it to try to resolve factual disputes over controversial policy issues? Too hard for the New York Times:

Mr. Bush argues that the expansion is too costly and would push people who could afford private insurance onto the government rolls, steering the program away from its initial aim of helping poor children. He said that states like New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Illinois and New Mexico spend more money on adults than children, and he reiterated his contention, which the authors of the bill dispute, that the measure could benefit some families earning up to $83,000 a year.

“That doesn’t sound poor to me,” the president said.

Welcome to the dystopia of "objective" journalism. What's particularly sad here is that other publications have already addressed this issue -- the Times could have just cribbed from them. For instance, here's the relevant passage from McClatchy that I praised on Monday:

President Bush claims that the bipartisan bill to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program "would result in taking a program meant to help poor children and turning it into one that covers children in households with incomes up to $83,000 a year."

That's not true.

The bill maintains current law. It limits the program to children from families with incomes up to twice the federal poverty level — now $20,650 for a family of four, for a program limit of $41,300 — or to 50 percentage points above a state's Medicaid eligibility threshold, which varies state to state.

States that want to increase eligibility beyond those limits would require approval from Bush's Health and Human Services Department, just as they must win waivers now. The HHS recently denied a request by New York to increase its income threshold to four times the poverty level — the $82,600 figure that Republican opponents of the bill are using.

Under current law, nineteen states have won waivers from these income limits. The biggest was granted to New Jersey, which upped its income limit to 350 percent of the federal poverty level, or $72,275 for a family of four in 2007. The expanded SCHIP program retains the waiver option under federal discretion; it doesn't change it.

Any chance McClatchy can take over the NYT's Washington bureau?

Update 10/5 11:14 AM: There's even more lameness in today's NYT story on the SCHIP debate, in which Rudy Giuliani is allowed to make an unsupported claim about "crowd out" without any contradiction from the writer or supporters of the bill:

In an interview yesterday on New Hampshire radio, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani framed the insurance program itself as a “typical Democratic, Clinton kind of thing” that substitutes government solutions for private section options. “Half to two-thirds of the children that they’re going to take care of already have private insurance,” Mr. Giuliani said. “They’re going to move them to the government. It is not just a beginning, it’s a big step in the direction of government-controlled medicine.”

Actually, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that about one-third of the children who will be added to the program already have private insurance -- here's McClatchy again:

The president also claims that the proposal would cause some families to drop private coverage and enroll their children in the cheaper SCHIP program.

That's true.

Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, said that was inevitable to some degree when any government program expanded. The CBO estimates that the legislation would attract 5.8 million new enrollees by 2012. Of them, 3.8 million would be uninsured and eligible under current requirements, and 2 million probably would have had private coverage before the expansion.

That's a rate of about 1 in 3 new enrollees dropping private insurance. "We don't see very many other policy options that would reduce the number of uninsured children by the same amount without creating more" dropouts from private insurance, Orszag said.

Comments

[Rob]

Perhaps you could enlighten us, Brendan. The McClatchy article of which you're so enamored reports, "The bill maintains current law. It limits the program to children from families with incomes up to twice the federal poverty level — now $20,650 for a family of four, for a program limit of $41,300 — or to 50 percentage points above a state's Medicaid eligibility threshold, which varies state to state." But nowhere that I can find in the McClatchy article does it explain what is the difference between the President's proposal to add $5 billion to S-CHIP and the Democrats' proposal to add some $40 billion to the program, and how the Democrats' adding the additional $35 billion simply "maintains current law."

The FactCheck.org article that McClatchy links to says, "The House bill would extend coverage to a total of 7.5 million people, 5 million of whom are uninsured, while the Senate bill would reach 6.1 million, 4 million of whom are uninsured, according to CBO reports." Is that simply maintaining current law, as McClatchy states?

I'm not trying to be argumentative; I'm genuinely confused. There seems to be more to the story than the vaunted McClatchy article reports.

[Brendan Nyhan]

I believe that it means the bill maintains current law in limiting SCHIP provision to double the federal poverty line without a waiver from the federal government.

[Rob]

If the formula remains the same, where are the 5.8 million new enrollees coming from? Is it too much to ask that articles like McClatchy's explain this stuff?

BTW, though the provision requiring waivers for SCHIP above twice the federal poverty line may stay the same, one can expect that waivers will be more liberally granted under a Democratic Administration than under Bush. I wonder if the cost estimates for the Democrats' proposal took into account the effect of a liberalization of the granting of waivers. Where's the analytical reporting that deals with these issues? Not in McClatchy, I'm afraid.

[Brendan Nyhan]

Here's the answer to the first question from Jason Furman of Brookings (the answer to the second question is surely no b/c it's speculative):

(1) The President supports a proposal that would reduce annual spending on SCHIP relative to inflation and reduce the number of covered children and pregnant women by 840,000 according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

You might ask how the $5 billion increase in spending over 5 years promised by the White House could result in more uninsured. The answer is that for technical reasons the CBO baseline assumes $5 billion in nominal dollars annually going forward, something depicted in the flat green line in your previous post. But spending at this baseline would fall relative to general price inflation and plummet relative to health spending growth. As a result, under CBO’s baseline the number of people covered would fall from 7.4 million in 2006 to 3.5 million in 2017, despite an increase in the eligible population.

(2) The Democrats and a substantial number of Senate Republicans support a proposal whose principal focus is covering low-income children who are currently eligible (3.2 million according to CBO) plus expanding coverage modestly to new children (600,000 according to CBO). In total 85 percent of the coverage expansion is for those who are already eligible but are not getting coverage either because the funding limits assumed in the baseline are projected to be reached leading states to turn away currently eligible children or because families simply do not sign up for the coverage that is available to them.

[ERF]

It's nice to see you responding, Brendan.