Progress Illinois

At a downtown Chicago press conference yesterday, GOP Rep. Mark Kirk outlined his alternative health care proposal and received coverage from numerous local outlets, including the Tribune, Daily Herald, Sun-Times, Chicago Public Radio, and ABC 7.  Not surprisingly, Kirk's remarks included several distortions about the Democrats' health care push, as well as the number of uninsured in America.  Most of the outlets circumvented these dubious assertions in their reports on their event, focusing instead on summarizing his plan.  ABC, however, put them front and center.  You can watch reporter Charles Thomas' full report below:

In his write-up of the above report, here is how Thomas handled Kirk's criticism of the public option:

Kirk wants Congress to pass a law forbidding the government from interfering in doctor-patient relationships and predicted that Obama's plan for a "public option" would cost 3 to 4 million people in Illinois their private insurance.

"Roughly two-thirds of Americans who have provided-employer care risk losing it, being forced into the government plan," Kirk said.

Rep. Peter Roskam has repeatedly issued similar warnings about Americans being pushed off their private plans and they are just wildly misleading. The Congressional Budget Office released a preliminary analysis (PDF) of the House Democrats' so-called "tri-committee" bill last week.  It found that, under the plan, about nine million people will lose or not be offered employment-based insurance by 2016. But on the flipside, 12 million individuals who do not currently get insurance from their employer would receive such coverage during the same period:

We estimate that about 12 million people who would not be enrolled in an employment-based plan under current law would be covered by one in 2016, largely because the mandate for individuals to be insured would increase workers’ demand for insurance coverage through their employer. On net, therefore, about 3 million more people would have their primary coverage through an employer under the proposal than under current law.

ABC also reported Kirk's suggestion that, by passing a plan preferred by the White House, the U.S. will lose its ability to provide quality treatment for life-threatening illnesses:

The congressman predicted a bureaucratic mess and claimed that the current US system was better than socialized European healthcare when it comes to treating deadly diseases.

"Be it cancer, be it heart disease, and be it diabetes, survival rates in the United States are far better than in Europe," said Rep. Mark Kirk, (R) Northbrook.

Why is the U.S. adept at treating things like cancer? It has little to do with the private insurance industry and lots to do with the amount of resources we devote to government-funded research, none of which will be curtailed by health care reform.

In citing cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, Kirk happened to pluck out a few metrics on which the U.S. scores very well. But across the board, U.S. health care outcomes aren't as rosy as Kirk would have us believe.  A 2003 ranking of 20 advanced countries showed that our system finished 16th when it came to “mortality amenable to health care," even though we spend far more per capita on medical treatments than any nation on earth.

Finally, let's move on to Kirk's position that the uninsured population is not as large as the Democrats claim it to be (H/T Ellen of the Tenth):

Mark Kirk also said he did not believe the Obama administration's report that there are 46 million uninsured Americans with the number growing by 14,000 every day. The congressman said, if you remove certain groups from that number, including non-citizens, and people who afford it who don't want it, the number falls to around 8 million.

Again, this is a standard line from Kirk. Speaking privately to the Republicans of Wheeling Township last year, he said that "15 million" of the 46 million uninsured Americans are undocumented immigrants. This year, he mysteriously dropped it down to 9.5 million “non-citizens." In fact, the number is closer to 5.6 million, according to data (PDF) from the National Institute for Health Care Management (which, to his credit, the Tribune's Rick Pearson cited in his article).

But what about Kirk's claim that most of the uninsured can afford coverage but are voluntarily forgoing it?  This is a common conservative refrain, voiced in the past by Bob Dole, the Washington Times editorial board, and others.  The Wonk Room cites the following data in response to this myth that "it's people's own fault" they're uninsured:

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), most Americans who lack health insurance “come from working families and have low incomes.” About two-thirds of the uninsured “are poor or near poor” and are “less likely to be offered employer-sponsored coverage or to be able to afford to purchase their own coverage.” [Kaiser Family Foundation, 10/15/2008]

More recently, a Families USA report pointed out that, of the nearly 3.5 million Illinoisians who went uninsured for at least a month during 2007 and 2008, most were "working families." Why are these temporary lapses in insurance so dangerous?  Because if one gets sick during such a period, or is denied coverage, there's a high risk of exposure to medical bankruptcy.

At the end of the ABC 7 segment, the reporters shrugged off Kirk's claims by simply stating that there is a "wide difference of opinion" regarding the number of uninsured "depending on who you talk to." If that's how the local media is going to handle Kirk's distortions, it's going to be a long, frustrating campaign season.