An Uneasy Alliance

My goodness, Paul Krugman with yet another Obama-basher.  But he is not backing Hillary's health care plan this time - Krugman is rallying to the Bartels argument (here and here) that Obama's sociology about embittered workers clinging to their guns, religion, and racism is hooey.

David Brooks pounds on the very serious question of Obama's electability.  His intro:

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that.

But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn’t on a questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in Iraq comment.

Brooks does not mention Obama's appalling linkage of unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers with US Senator Tom Coburn, but that is yet another example of Obama's utter inability or unwillingness to risk offending his own side.

AT MY LIMIT (PAVLOV NODS):  OK, I can't spend another second in agreement with Paul Krugman, so let me gloat about something else and resume the attack - in defending Hillary's health care fiction in Ohio fiction last week, Krugman presented his own fiction that stood in contradiction to the NY Times reporting.

Now I see that a correction has been electronically appended at the Times website as of April 15, and ran in the paper while I was filing my taxes.  Here we go, in a marvel of opacity even by the standards of a Times "correction":

In his column on Friday, Paul Krugman discussed an anecdote told by Hillary Clinton about a woman in Ohio who supposedly lost her newborn child, and then her life, because of bills run up when she did not have health insurance. Mr. Krugman relied on early news accounts of the incident, but later accounts, including one from The Columbus Dispatch, show that those bills did not lead to loss of care. Mr. Krugman has posted a detailed explanation on his blog at krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.

That should mention later reports from the Columbus Dispatch and the NY Times, which showed the woman had health insurance at the time of her crisis.  "Those bills" did not lead to loss of care; nor did lack of insurance, the point emphasized by Krugman.

C'mon, if they want to pretend that Krugman overlooked an obscure story in a paper we will never hear from again, that is one thing.  But this correction is hiding the fact that Krugman contradicted accurate reporting from the Times.

As to the notion that these were "later reports", Krugman's column appeared on April 11.  The Times broke the Hillary fiction on April 5 in their Saturday edition; in his column Krugman cited an AP story (which he misattributed to the Washington Post) which mentioned without contradiction the Times report that the woman, Trina Bachtel, did in fact have insurance.

The Columbus Dispatch story has a Friday, April 11 dateline and helpful supplemental details, so I got help there with my April 11 rebuttal, and we can see how Krugman must have missed that if he filed on April 10.  But the central point, that the woman had insurance and had received regular pre-natal care, was made on April 5 by the Times and subsequently supported by the AP, as cited by Krugman, and the WaPo on April 7. 

Well - does the Times have a policy of correcting their corrections?  Doubtful, but we (and be we, I mean the sinister Swiftees) did manage a corrected correction once with Kristof.

Let's dig into Krugman's blog post where he explains this.  Bring a shovel! 

There is more information on the Trina Bachtel story, which I wrote about in Friday’s column — and a correction is in order. 

It has been clear from early in this controversy, including from Times reporting, that Bachtel was insured at the time of her death. Some people read my column to say otherwise. That was not my intended implication, although I obviously didn’t write clearly enough.

Her family asserted, however, that she had been unable to receive care from a local clinic, even though insured at the time of her pregnancy, because of unpaid bills from an earlier period in her life when she had been uninsured. It was in that sense that lack of insurance allegedly contributed to her death, the assertion I made at the end of the column.

Wow.  Did his editors buy that?  Here is how I strained to hang that attack on Krugman, employing the devious Freak Show tactic of quoting Krugman's own column in context; here is his conclusion that he acknowledges himself: 

And if being a progressive means anything, it means believing that we need universal health care, so that terrible stories like those of Monique White, Trina Bachtel and the thousands of other Americans who die each year from lack of insurance become a thing of the past.

Of course, it was not just in his conclusion that Krugman implied Ms. Bachtel lacked health insurance.  In introducing Ms. Bachtel, Krugman wrote this: 

Not long ago, a young Ohio woman named Trina Bachtel, who was having health problems while pregnant, tried to get help at a local clinic. 

Unfortunately, she had previously sought care at the same clinic while uninsured and had a large unpaid balance. The clinic wouldn’t see her again unless she paid $100 per visit — which she didn’t have. 

Eventually, she sought care at a hospital 30 miles away. By then, however, it was too late. Both she and the baby died.

Now, he does not explicitly say she did not currently have insurance, but her certainly does not volunteer information about her current status, choosing instead to highlight that in the past she had not had insurance.  Was clarity his intent, especially coupled with his "if being a progressive means anything" close?

He continues: 

You may think that this was an extreme case, but stories like this are common in America. 

Back in 2006, The Wall Street Journal told another such story: that of a young woman named Monique White, who failed to get regular care for lupus because she lacked insurance. Then, one night, “as skin lesions spread over her body and her stomach swelled, she couldn’t sleep.”

"Stories like this are common".  What stories?  Well, the Monique White story he tells is of a woman who lacked insurance.  Was this really just an accidental lack of clarity?  I guess now we are supposed to believe that what he meant was, stories of people who develop bad medical conditions, regardless of their insurance situation, are common.  Right.

Professor Clarity continues: 

How can such things happen?... 

First of all, visits to the emergency room are no substitute for regular care, which can identify and treat health problems before they get acute....

Ms. Bachtel was receiving regular care, as the Times had reported. 

Second, uninsured Americans often postpone medical care, even when they know they need it, because of expense.

I am sure that is so, but why include that fact in a story about a person who had insurance? 

Finally, while it’s true that hospitals will treat anyone who arrives in an emergency room with an acute problem — and it’s wonderful that they will — it’s also true that hospitals bill patients for emergency-room treatment. And fear of those bills often causes uninsured Americans to hesitate before seeking medical help, even in emergencies, as the Monique White story illustrates.

Mysteriously, Trina Bachtel has dropped out of the story.  But she comes right back:

The end result is that the uninsured receive a lot less care than the insured. And sometimes this lack of care kills them. According to a recent estimate by the Urban Institute, the lack of health insurance leads to 27,000 preventable deaths in America each year. 

But are they really preventable? Yes. Stories like those of Trina Bachtel and Monique White are common in America, but don’t happen in any other rich country — because every other advanced nation has some form of universal health insurance. We should, too.

So now Ms. Bachtel is explicitly back in a story about the uninsured, even though Krugman did not intend that implication.  Dare we ask for a break here?

I suppose I should tackle his next paragraph of explanation:

I went with that account, based on this AP report. I should, in retrospect, have worried about some lack of detail in that report. The Columbus Dispatch reports that the debts in question had been written off as uncollectable long before her pregnancy, so that it does not appear that they were a barrier to care.

No, it was not the Columbus Dispatch that reported that on April 11; it was the Washington Post that reported that fact on April 7, presumably in time for Krugman's April 11 column:

But court records show that Bechtel had a civil judgment against her by the Holzer Hospital Foundation for the amount of $4,426, entered in 2002, which was repaid in 2005. A call to an official at Holzer Medical Center, which is run by the foundation, in Ohio was not immediately returned.

Just to establish a bit of a timeline:

Saturday, April 5 - Times story blasts Hillary;
Sunday, April 6 - Hillary bashing on the talk shows;

Monday afternoon, April 7:  No Quarter airs a video of a family member; Jake Tapper reports ("Is Hillary's Much-Maligned Hospital Story Fundamentally True?", Talk Left joins in.

Monday evening, April 7:  The Wash Post enters the fray ("Clinton Told True Tale of Woe, Says Kin") with the story cited above, which reports that the once-unpaid claim has been settled and that Ms. Bachtel did have insurance.

And somewhere in there the AP chimed in; Memeorandum highlights the action as of Monday evening.

Now, take the Columbus Dispatch out of the mix and give Krugman the Saturday Times, the AP, and the Wash Post to work with.  All three agree that the woman had insurance.  Per the WaPo, Ms. Bachtel never sought care at the nearby clinic; she thought she would be turned away, and in any case was receiving regular care elsewhere (as the Columbus Dispatch later reported in more detail).

Per the AP, Ms. Bachtel was turned away twice.  That has not stood up.

Let me close with emphasis on this point:

Two points that are not affected by this correction:

1. Hillary Clinton repeated in good faith a story she had been told, although she should have vetted it.

2. Many people do in fact die from lack of insurance.

I agree that the health care system in this nation is based on a patchwork of tax laws and other regulations that have led to a system that could surely be improved.

However, as to Hillary's good faith - if she has devoted twenty years to this issue, could we ask her to relate to us some true, heartwrenching stories?  Should be easy.

Comments

[clarice]

I never want to get on TM's shit list.
Also, when even your demented columnist doesn't read your paper, Pinch, you are in trouble.

[sbw]

The strength of TM's writing lies in his ability to muck out the stalls.

To do that you need to be able to stand the stench. So, either TM has the strength of Hercules, who cleaned the Augean Stables, or no nose.

[Danube of Thought]

When is somebody going to do a story on people who die needlessly because they're in a single-payer system? I noticed an article yesterday to the effect that while prostate cancer deaths in the US have declined sharply in the past decade (PSA testing), the UK rate has remained unchanged (little or no testing).

My hunch is that TM could bang out such a piece ere the sun sets this night.

[MayBee]

he Columbus Dispatch reports that the debts in question had been written off as uncollectable long before her pregnancy, so that it does not appear that they were a barrier to care.

Armando at TalkLeft refuses to accept Krugman's correction, because the debt being uncollectable would not have been removed from her credit report.

So.

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

2. Many people do in fact die from lack of insurance.

How do we know this to be so?

[Ken]

It amazes me that an opinion columnist for the Times -- surely the most valuable real estate in journalism (still) -- confesses an inability to tell a simple story, and then obfuscates with utter bullshit when it turns out that he was completely and unambiguously wrong. Not that this will surprise anyone, but the possibilities are that Krugman is either a liar or an idiot. Maybe even both.

[Elliott]

So, either TM has the strength of Hercules, who cleaned the Augean Stables, or no nose.

sbw, while reading your comment an amusing onomastic similarity occurred to me. One might be tempted to say that Rezko and Obama occupy a place in the Auchian (or Auchean) stables.

On the far more agreeable subject of our most excellent host:

"May his wonders never cease/he has the strength of ten/first in war, first in peace/first in the hearts of his countrymen!" as the courtiers said in "The Coming of Gowf."