Grading PolitiFact: Paul Krugman compares Massachusetts with the U.S. of A

PolitiFact recognizes that there is a difference between the truth of a literal statement and the truth of the underlying argument.  But the fact check operation routinely ignores one in favor of the other or applies differing standards to each depending on the case.

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Greg Joyce:  editor


Analysis:

It isn't hard to obtain a clue that PolitiFact will give Krugman a break on his literal statement.  Krugman says the Senate plan is "identical" to the one passed in Massachusetts.  PolitiFact goes for an underlying argument to the effect that the plans are merely similar.

Jacobson provides some background:

As it happened, Massachusetts passed its own health care reform plan in 2006, with the help of both Republican Gov. Mitt Romney and a heavily Democratic legislature. Brown, then serving in the state Senate, voted for the plan.

On the Jan. 31, 2010, edition of ABC's This Week, host Barbara Walters asked Brown about his vote on the Massachusetts plan. "Why isn't what's good for Massachusetts good for the whole country?" she asked.

Brown responded, "In Massachusetts, the free market, the free enterprise has taken control, and they're offering a wide range of plans. I've never ever said that people should not get health insurance. It's just a question of if we're going to take a one-size-fits-all government plan or we're going to do something where the individual states can tailor their plans as we've done."

When Walters asked him, "Do you think the whole plan should be scrapped?" Brown said, "Yes."

"The whole plan?" Walters continued.

"Yes," Brown said.

But this fact check is ostensibly about Paul Krugman, not Sen. Brown.

More background from Jacobson:

Later, during the show's round-table segment, liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman expressed disbelief at Brown's response.

"That was the most evasive answer," Krugman said. "If you think this is a straightforward guy, that was an incredibly evasive answer on health care, because the Senate bill, which has now stalled, is identical to the Massachusetts health care plan -- the same thing. Only in the finest of fine print is there any difference. He voted for the Massachusetts plan. A majority of voters in Massachusetts who voted for him approve of the Massachusetts health care plan. Nonetheless, their plan is dead."

We wanted to see whether the Massachusetts plan was indeed "the same thing" as the bill passed by the U.S. Senate. So we looked at the details of both plans and consulted with an ideologically diverse group of health policy experts.

PolitiFact, in other words, will factually ignore whether Krugman was correct that Brown was not forthcoming respecting his voting position in favor of a narrow focus on whether the Massachusetts plan is significantly similar to the Senate plan.

Summarizing the comparison, PolitiFact listed seven similarities and "several" differences that were lumped into two highlighted points.

PolitiFact missed the point by a mile.  The differences PolitiFact listed weren't even the big ones cited by Brown:  The Senate bill applies to all of the states rather than just Massachusetts and severely limits the ability of states to tailor insurance policy for their residents.

Indeed, it was obvious that Krugman's point was not merely that the plans were similar but that Brown was somehow misleading with his answer.  But Krugman offered absolutely no evidence to refute the key differences cited by Brown.  Which is just as well, because those differences are undeniable.

So, after cutting Krugman a break on his literal statement and his underlying argument, we get the final judgment:

(I)t seems that there's broad agreement that, despite some operational differences, the broad structure of the Massachusetts health care plan is quite similar to that in the U.S. Senate bill -- certainly more similar than either one is to, say, a single-payer health care plan or even to the current system. Krugman's comparison of the two plans is Mostly True.

And if Krugman is right about the similarities then he must also be right that Brown is most certainly not any sort of straightforward guy.  Right?  That's the impression left by PolitiFact.  And they call it fact checking.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Greg Joyce:  F



Afters:

Compare the Krugman fact check with one done recently on Scott Brown:

Here's what he said during a Feb. 4, 2010, news conference, shortly after he was sworn in.

“The last stimulus bill didn’t create one new job, and in some states the money that was actually released hasn’t even been used yet,” Brown said.

ABC's Jonathan Karl immediately followed up. “It didn’t create one new job?” Karl asked.

“That’s correct. We lost another 85,000 jobs again, give or take, last month,” Brown responded.  “And in Massachusetts, it hasn’t created one new job and throughout the country as well. It may have retained some, but it hasn’t created any new jobs."

As with Krugman's statements that the insurance plans were "identical" or even only different in the "finest of the fine print," Brown's literal statement that the stimulus bill created no new jobs at all was probably false, though in the latter case PolitiFact used numbers for jobs "created or saved" as a counterexample, which is deductively insufficient.  And in context, it was fairly plain that Brown was referring to net jobs as his underlying argument, since he referred to 85,000 jobs lost.  While there are certainly things to criticize in Brown's statement under that interpretation, the underlying argument is not ridiculous.  But PolitiFact graded Brown "Pants-On-Fire!" and Krugman "Mostly True."

These cases provide yet more evidence that PolitiFact judgments are largely a matter of taste.