The New Health Dialogue

Credit: Paurian

Two days ago, we wrote about the “kerfuffle” surrounding a recent McKinsey & Co. study. The study claims 30% of employers will drop employee health care coverage, contrary to many other non-partisan reports. Despite the study being picked up by most major news outlets and seized on by health care reform opponents, we found a troubling problem with the study’s methodology: it hasn’t been released.

Even though McKinsey’s own Bowen Garrett, the chief economist at their Center for U.S. Health System Reform, published an Urban Institute report in January that directly refutes the McKinsey study, the aberrant study has continued to be widely cited and circulated.  GOP Senator Ron Johnson and former McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin are now citing the study as proof of the ballooning costs of Obamacare while Karl Rove opines “The ObamaCare Bad News Continues” in the Wall Street Journal, also pointing to the “devastating” study.

As we said on Wednesday, a study countering common wisdom shouldn’t be discounted out-of-hand, but it certainly warrants a closer look.  Health care policy decisions, much like informed medical decisions, must be based on real and transparent data.

In the days following our blog post, the controversy has been picked up by numerous blogs:

• Greg Sargent on the Washington Post’s blog The Plum Line describes the “interesting turn in the case of the mystery health care study.”  
• Joan McCarter for Daily Kos states, “Until McKinsey comes clean about the methodology behind this survey, it can’t be considered legitimate.”
• Jonathan Cohn for The New Republic summarizes the controversy well, adding, “Until we know more about how McKinsey did its research, the firm's prediction is no more reliable than if Karl Rove or some other conservative operative had invented it out of whole cloth.”
• Paul Krugman also covers the issue on his blog, coining it “McKinseyGate” and commenting on how “the media [gives the] claims lots of attention, while barely covering the furor over the refusal to explain where those claims come from.”
• Rick Ungar, on his Policy Page blog at Forbes, looks the financial incentives that might drive McKinsey to release such a study. He states, "Who will these companies turn to in order to get advice on the benefits of unraveling their complicated and extensive employee benefit plans and for assistance in executing any new plans for the same? Mckinsey & Company."
• Avik Roy, Ungar's conservative counterpart at Forbes, doesn't think our "coup de grâce" concerning Bowen Garrett's dual roles is "as impressive a debating point as it seems."
• Finally, as Steve Benen notes for the Washington Monthly’s blog Political Animal, if these latest events aren’t enough to get the press to take an interest, then it’s likely that nothing would be enough.

The biggest source of pressure, however, has come from Congressional Democrats. Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus wrote a letter to McKinsey asking specific questions about the study’s methodology, and House Democrats from the Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means (who even tweeted about it), and Education and Workforce committees also sent a letter requesting more information about the study.

We hope these efforts will culminate in McKinsey’s release of the study’s methodology and survey questions. A McKinsey spokesperson tells us the company won’t have any comment on the Democrats’ formal request for the info.

The take-away point here is that if the McKinsey study’s findings were not being widely used as political weapon against the health reform law -- and helping to shape the public debate over it -- it might not matter as much that McKinsey is refusing to release the information we need to evaluate them. But the findings are being used this way, so it's fair game to demand that the company release the data.  Anyone citing McKinsey’s study should also note that repeated requests for this information have been turned down.