Deceiving themselves and other denial behavior

There was a recent story about how great and wonderful it will be: California health insurance costs were predicted to be well below anticipated and inexpensive and all that. The reality shows something a bit different. Via Meadia describes how ACA Supporters Spin Obamacare Disaster into Good News by Cooking the Books.

“Upon closer examination, health care scholar Avik Roy noticed that the comparison used by the state to say that the new rates would save consumers money was spurious. Rather than comparing individual plans to individual plans, the state was comparing individual plans to small business plans. And lo and behold, when you compare like plans to like plans, the numbers look much worse.”

For a bonus, as an indication of the bias of the author, you have this:

“That said, the world won’t end with Obamacare. It’s not the worst policy ever created. The pre-2010 system was seriously flawed and driving the country towards bankruptcy, and Republicans who hate Obamacare should ask themselves what the GOP majority in the Senate and the House did about health care between 2001 and 2007. Both parties share the blame for this mess; Republican immobility enabled bad Democratic policy.”

It’s all the Republicans fault, you see. There are two pre-2010 efforts pushed by the Bush administration to improve the health care situation that have been proven to be quite effective. One is the HSA and the other is Medicare Part D. Both put market forces to work and both have resulted in much venom from political opposition and both are under assault by ACA provisions. As for “Republican immobility” one needs to note that ACA was only passed when the Democrats had both legislative and executive branches of government and even then needed some questionable shenanigans to get passed. There isn’t much you can do when in the minority and being opposed by folks who don’t care much for whether they can get buy-in from their opposition.

The lack of intellectual integrity, whether cooking the books or using logical fallacies such as ‘everybody is to blame’ are key behaviors to look for in determing the quality of a position.