Camden: Alternative facts sometimes a case of alternative data

As one of the nation’s dwindling supply of Democratic governors in a state that benefits from the new law by significantly more residents with health insurance, it’s not surprising Inslee wants Congress to keep the law, with maybe a tweak or two. Late last year, Inslee and Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler wrote to McMorris Rodgers and some other GOP reps, urging them not to guillotine the law. McMorris Rodgers, et al, wrote back about a month later suggesting they were ready to let the blade come down because of a “list of horribles” about the downside of Obamacare:

Premiums went up an average of 13.6 percent this year in Washington, they wrote, as did deductibles, and the number of plans available went from 143 plans from 12 insurers to 98 plans from nine insurers. Plus 80 of the newly insured were “forced” into Medicaid, which a Harvard University study of the government health care program in Oregon showed has high costs and low performance.

A spokeswoman for Inslee promptly labeled those figures “alternative facts” which ignore the fact that three-quarters of a million folks in Washington who didn’t used to have health insurance now do. Kreidler, whose office curates most facts about health insurance for the state, suggested later that the facts cited by the Republican congresspersons are not so much alternative, as “cherry picked.”

The 13.6 percent average increase is correct, and is the highest since the law passed. But it’s lower than the average increase of 18.6 percent for the three years before the law passed in 2010. The average increase for the three years of Obamacare is 6.7 percent, because the average increase in 2015 was 1.5 percent and in 2016 was 3.9 percent.

Debate over school funding

The phrase also came up in the recent debate over money for public schools, of which the Legislature must find more, a fact for which there is no alternative. Senators sparred on Wednesday over whether the latest GOP alternative takes money away from more than a half-million kids in Washington’s public schools as Democrats contend, or a just a couple here and there, as Republicans insisted.

One might think this is easy to solve, but only if one has not spent much time around the Legislature. As a very helpful staff report later pointed out, the numbers depend on what years a person is comparing, what one assumes happens in between those years to taxes and programs, and how one then accounts for all of those changes.

In other words, not so much alternative facts but complicated data spread over different scenarios to produce alternative results. But until Democrats and Republicans agree on the data and the most accurate scenario, a solution to the public school debate will remain out of reach. And that’s not a good alternative.