Yes, Megan McArdle Is Wrong Once Again: Health Care Reform Predictive Analysis Blogging
Read beyond the first two paragraphs, Megan, please!
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011:
How US health care reform will affect employee benefits: The shift away from employer-provided health insurance will be vastly greater than expected and will make sense for many companies and lower-income workers alike...
McKinsey, June 20, 2011:
US employer healthcare survey | McKinsey & Company: In February 2011, McKinsey & Company commissioned a survey of 1,329 U.S. private sector employers to measure their attitudes about healthcare reform. The opinion survey was paid for entirely by McKinsey as part of its routine, proprietary research.
We stand by the integrity and methodology of the survey.
The survey was not intended as a predictive economic analysis of the impact of the Affordable Care Act. Rather, it captured the attitudes of employers and provided an understanding of the factors that could influence decision making related to employee health benefits.
As such, our survey results are not comparable to the healthcare research and analysis conducted by others such as the Congressional Budget Office, RAND and the Urban Institute. Each of those studies employed economic modeling, not opinion surveys, and focused on the impact of healthcare reform on individuals, not employer attitudes.
Comparing the McKinsey survey to economic estimates, such as the CBO’s, is comparing apples to oranges. While the McKinsey Quarterly article about the survey cited CBO estimates, any comparison is not apt. We understand how the language in the article [How US health care reform will affect employee benefits] could lead the reader to think the research was a prediction, but it is not...
For the McKinsey Quarterly to write "The shift away from employer-provided health insurance will be vastly greater than expected" by CBO and others is for the McKinsey Quarterly to make a predictive economic analysis.
For McKinsey to then say that that the claim is not a prediction--and that it "understand[s] how the language in the article [How US health care reform will affect employee benefits] could lead the reader to think the research was a prediction" is a repudiation of the article's lead.
And here we have Megan McArdle:
Did McKinsey Repudiate their Employer Health Care Survey?: As I scrolled through the RSS reader this morning, my attention was grabbed by this guest-post on Jonathan Cohn's blog. The author is Jonathan Gruber…. [O]ne claim rather jumped out at me:
Claim #3: The ACA Will Lead to a Large Erosion of Employer-Sponsored Insurance
To make this claim the committee leans on a report from McKinsey so flawed that the firm itself ultimately repudiated it…
I found this rather startling. I thought I had followed the debate over the McKinsey survey (which showed large numbers of employers saying they'd drop their coverage after ObamaCare went into effect) rather closely, and I didn't remember them repudiating it. I asked the Official Blog Spouse, who had also followed the debate rather closely. He had seen the same article, and been puzzled by the same thing…. [Gruber's links] didn't show McKinsey repudiating the survey. Rather, they referenced Brian Beutler's story in which several anonymous McKinsey employees of uncertain seniority or involvement in healthcare and/or HR projects, bashing the study…. McKinsey has about 9,000 employees around the world. I am sure more than three of them were unhappy that the company had released a report critical of ObamaCare, since hundreds of them donated a total of $207,296 to Obama in the 2008 campaign cycle. But this hardly proves anything, especially since at least one of these insiders was clearly not very well plugged in: ten days later, McKinsey released their survey materials. And they were hardly "damaging"….
So where was the repudiation? Googling "McKinsey repudiates health care survey" turns up only this:
In February 2011, McKinsey & Company commissioned a survey of 1,329 U.S. private sector employers to measure their attitudes about healthcare reform. The opinion survey was paid for entirely by McKinsey as part of its routine, proprietary research.
We stand by the integrity and methodology of the survey…
Unless both the Official Blog Spouse and I are misremembering--entirely possible, of course--this seems like a very strange way to characterize the study. Saying that a firm has repudiated something is a strong factual claim with a fairly narrow meaning…
The repudiation--it comes in paragraph 5 of the document from which McArdle quotes paragraphs 1 and 2.
The sentence, "We understand how the language in the article [How US health care reform will affect employee benefits] could lead the reader to think the research was a prediction, but it is not", is a repudiation of the prediction in the study's lead that: "The shift away from employer-provided health insurance will be vastly greater than expected."
