Do Pelosi, Hoyer perpetuate disinformation with ‘USA Today’ editorial?

Politicos have a habit of spitting out statistics to justify succeeding in their goals, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) are no exception. In their joint USA Today editorial, the two Democrats do the expected in more than one way. First they suggest the protesters showing up at local meetings are “un-American.” Then they cite figures President Obama and others have tossed to media with almost no questions asked about how the study supporting that figure.

In the editorial, Pelosi-Hoyer said, “Never again will medical bills drive Americans into bankruptcy…”

If you’ve listened to statists push socialized medicine, you’ll be familiar with the statement 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical.

The study supporting that figure comes from David U. Himmelstein, MD, et al.

To give credit where it’s due, the normally pro-Obama network ABC had one lone voice question the study. In June, director of polling at ABC News David Langer wrote, “Again, the lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, is a co-founder of the ‘Physicians for a National Health Program,’ an advocacy group calling for a ‘public or quasi-public’ single-payer health system. One wonders whether other researchers, with other perspectives, might have presented the data differently.”

The Democrats and select Republicans did the same thing with their oft-cited ’45 million who can’t get insurance’ figures. Several writers, including me, picked those figures apart and came up with some surprises. A number of other media followed suit. Now you don’t hear that ’45 million’ get bandied about too much.

Now the figures are all about bankruptcy. And of course the left has marshaled formal support from the millions President Barack Obama’s ‘Organizing for America’ political machine assembled into a database. I received an email urging me to go to my senator’s local office, ostensibly to support the Dem health plans, although we have no way of knowing what will be in the final bill at this point.

Is it possible that Congress’ tightening the bankruptcy laws led to more claims based on medical reasons? Is it possible that respondents in the study already had indebtedness when medical bills made things worse? Few Americans traditionally saved for a rainy day, especially when credit was extended to millions with no questions asked about income, ability to pay or in many cases, citizenship.

Lawyers routinely solicit business in the bankruptcy market because you can lower your medical bills to pennies on the dollar. Who do you think picks up that tab? The US consumer and the US taxpayer.

I personally have confronted large medical debt incurred when our children were small. I was overwhelmed—how would we pay off the $17,000 debt when we were barely making ends meet? My husband took a legal pad and asked me to sit at the table with him one night. We devised a plan. It began with notifying every creditor that we had experienced a medical catastrophe. We adopted cost-saving measures, starting with cancelling our cable TV subscription and moving on to my creating menus for each week. If I went into a grocery, I could tell the cashier what I owed within $5 of the total. It took us several years, but we paid every dime. In between all that we experienced a major hurricane and took losses from that. But we paid what we owed. It would never have occurred to us to file bankruptcy.

The nation’s largest bankruptcy firm, Macey and Aleman, present an inconvenient statistic in a blog post: “Canada’s state bankruptcy information statistic (57% to our 60%), which challenges the theory that improved health care system might solve our debt funk.”

Yet Pelosi-Hoyer promise Americans will “never again” have to file bankruptcy because of medical problems.

Pelosi and Hoyer are part of a political machine that has successfully tanked the dot com bubble and the housing bubble. Now they want control over an industry intricately linked to personal freedom. Medicare and Medicaid have attracted record fraud. And if you think about it, healthcare prices began to rise and the quality of care began to suffer as Medicare and Medicaid grew their customer base, removing more and more consumers from the private market.

We need healthcare reform for sure. The best place to begin would be to rein in entitlement spending, address the undocumented immigrant welfare recipient issue, and get the government’s hand out of the market as much as possible.

The study notes that in addition to independent checks on court records, “As with any survey, we depend on respondents’ candor.” If you’re filing bankruptcy, wouldn’t you rely on medical reasons if you could even if there were other factors?

What we need is a little candor from the statists running our government. Last time I looked they were running it into the ground.

[Ed. Note: Something look ‘fishy’ to you? If so, use the email icon to report me to The White House. Mail the column to flag@whitehouse.gov.  If you wanted to be fair, you should also flag the Pelosi-Hoyer op-ed piece.]