ABC News Discovers an Obama 'Mischaracterization'

The impervious media wall shielding Mr. Obama is being to show signs of cracking. ABC News' blog The Numbers has examined the numbers the administration is using to promote its push for universal health care and is saying something astonishing!

President Obama’s kicking off his health care reform today in the worst possible way: with a mischaracterization of data.

“The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds," Obama said at the opening of his White House forum on health care reform. The problem: That claim, based on a 2001 survey, is simply unsupportable.

Who said diplomacy was dead? The proper word, reporter Gary Langer probably knows, is not mischaracterization, which I think should be hyphenated. The word is fabrication. It is stretching the truth completely beyond recognition.

But at least it's a step in the right direction, and perfectly understandable given ABC's -- and other MSM outlets' -- past unwillingness to question the president too intensely. There's more to the report.

The figure comes from a 2005 Harvard University study saying that 54 percent of bankruptcies in 2001 were caused by health expenses. We reviewed it internally and knocked it down at the time; an academic reviewer did the same in 2006. Recalculating Harvard’s own data, he came up with a far lower figure – 17 percent.

A more recent study by another group, approaching it another way, indicates that in 2007 about eight-tenths of one percent of Americans lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs. That rings a little less loudly than “one every 30 seconds.”

If you do the math, one medical-expense related bankruptcy every 30 seconds would mean over 1,050,000 each year, which is about the amount of all bankruptcies for all causes filed.

Maybe this is what Mr. Obama meant by greater transparency: finally people are beginning to see through his soaring rhetoric.