Jake Tapper/factcheck.org on claims about the Koch Bros funded study on health care costs

[Nanjeanne]

76. I know what Tapper said but his conclusion on the accuracy of Sanders and AOC is simply

Ridiculous.

Tapper says “The study’s author says that that $2 trillion drop is not actually his conclusion. He says that’s based on assumptions by Senator Sanders.” Tapper then turns to the “alternative scenario” Blahous constructs in the appendix of his report, which shows that, if you do not do Bernie Sanders’s plan but instead do a different plan with higher provider payment rates, then obviously the overall cost of the plan increases.

There’s a problem with that. And using Mercatus to defend Mercatus study is kind of silly.

The provider payment rates in Sanders’s plan are not assumptions. There are a lot of assumptions that go into scoring these plans. For instance, you have to make assumptions about how much more people will go to the doctor and how much more medicine they will take. But Provider payment rates are not assumptions. They are written into the law itself. If Sanders says he is going to use Medicare reimbursement rates to pay providers, then that is what he is going to use. Using something to score that replaces those rates with some other set of rates is not a score of Sanders’s plan. That’s number one.

Also why does Tapper (and Fact-check) believe what Blahous tells him about the study. What happened in this case is that Blahous wrote a study that showed federal expenditures would increase by $32.6 trillion and then buried the fact that this same estimate showed Americans overall would save $2 trillion in the tables of his report. After some writers and politicians pickd up on this - Blahous then claimed that the estimate he just got finished promoting to the world is actually not the real one and that instead the real estimate is the one in the appendix that he calls an “alternative scenario” and that he says explicitly in the paper does not track Sanders’s plan as written.

Why does anyone take for a given that Blahous’s new representation of his study, which came after he saw the reaction to it, should be assumed to be the correct one just because he authored the initial study. Rather the initial study stands alone and says what it says.

If a journalist doesn’t have the necessary skills to analyze the full Sanders report, and no reason why they should, they need to talk to a lot of people from different sides who have read the report and have the skills necessary to describe it to you. Instead, Tapper decided to only ask Blahous, who has an incentive to deceive people, what the report says rather than asking neutral experts or experts from different political persuasions to describe the report. Same with fact check fact checking in this case

places like fact-check.org can serve a useful purpose sometimes. But people need to actually read and think things through themselves using lots of sources. If the premise is flawed - as it was in this case - then conclusions can only be flawed.