The Conservative Misinformation Feedback Loop

This is an interesting post by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic. It's actually a follow-up to his previous post on a "perfect case study of the broader phenomena of right-wing media creating a closed information circuit, in which even claims that are demonstrably false questions of fact can circulate unchallenged."

The false claim, in this case, is that the financing is phony in the health care reform bill because it doesn't take into account physician pay increases (the so-called "doc fix").

Let me first explain the underlying issue. It's not very complicated. In 1997, Congress tinkered with the formula for reimbursing doctors who treat Medicare patients. Congress bungled the formula, accidentally creating a massive cut. Congress takes back the cut on a year-by-year basis, a ritual known as the "doc fix." But technically, the cut remains on the books for future years. In other words, there are hidden costs in the budget.

Numerous conservatives, led by [Paul] Ryan, have tried to claim that the cost of the doc fix is a hidden cost of the Affordable Care Act. Obama's numbers aren't real, they say, because they don't account for the money needed for future doc fixes. Of course, fixing this problem isn't part of the Affordable Care Act at all. It's a cost that would have occurred whether or not the Affordable Care Act was passed. Indeed, Ryan's own health care plan, as well as the main House Republican plan, did nothing to address the doc fix. The Affordable Care Act simply did not use imaginary physician reimbursement cuts to pay for coverage expansions. I've pointed this out numerous times, most recently in the item mentioned above.

So what kind of reply does Chait get to his first post? The answer from the right is a deliberate falsehood, removing four words from a report by the Congressional Budget Office that prove Chait's point!

Did you catch that? [Jeffrey H.] Anderson used ellipses to remove the part of the quote that disproves his entire claim. He removed the part that says "other than physicians' services," and then wrote, "That's the physician pay cut." But it's not the physician pay cut. The physician pay cut is simply not part of the financing of this law. By the way, I'm not merely going off my own interpretation on this. I checked this with Paul Van de Water, a budget expert with years of analytical experience at the Congressional Budget Office and other places. He's the one who tracked down the Reid letter for me.

Van de Water was astonished at the brazenness of the tactic used by Anderson, or whoever is feeding misinformation to Anderson. I wasn't. Real budget wonks who circulate among genuine experts often fail to understand the degree to which the public debate is driven by pure hacks. I'm not picking on some marginal figure here. Anderson has been writing about health care for nearly all the major conservative publications. Very few conservatives follow health care reform in any detail. They have a general hostility to government and proposals formulated by Democrats, and since they reject the overwhelming majority of actual health care experts on ideological grounds, they have relied on a tiny handful of self-styled conservative pseudo-wonks to fill in the details for them.

But figures like Anderson are simply not up to the job. And once some factual misapprehension has made its way into the right-wing echo chamber, it's nearly impossible to dislodge. The same basic phenomenon can be seen is debates over climate change, supply-side economics, and other issues. You have a whole ideological movement that, to a substantial degree, relies upon the pseudo-expertise of cranks and hacks.

Unfortunately, that whole ideological movement is operated by people who don't care that they're lying. In their eyes, the question is not "Is this true?" but "Will this claim work politically?" Let's face it, no one ever thought that "death panels" were in the bill, either. So what? The right-wing is perfectly willing to lie. In fact, it almost seems to me that they prefer lying.