Addendum: 'The Importance of Critical Thinking'

Yes, another addendum. This one deals with my previous post, 'The Importance of Critical Thinking'. However, it doesn't deals with my remarks on healthcare reform, rather than the main point. (I am not retracting my belief that 'critical thinking' is important, in other words.) Here's the part I screwed up:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was instructed to tally up the costs for H.R. 3590, aka the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act aka Healthcare Reform. However, for political reasons, various healthcare reform-related bills were separate and not part of the CBO's tally. So it is both correct and incorrect to say that healthcare reform would increase the deficit: the primary bill won't, but various other bills probably will.

Yeah, it's a bit more complicated than that. Several of the examples given the video don't add up. Having looked into them, I'm not sure the 'doc fix' can legitimately be called a part of health care reform, since it's an artifact from a 1997 attempt to save money on medicare costs by slashing doctor compensation and arguably has nothing to do with the recent bill*.

What about double counting? This appears to be legitimate:

To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.

Accounting tricks! Oh my! Well, not quite. Note the bolded part**. So the CBO did not count Medicare savings twice. Ergo, to subtract the trust fund savings from the CBO's figures would be misleading. (However, to take people to task for describing the bill as both improving the solvency of Medicare and reducing the deficit would be correct.)

The evidence is rather messy and complicated. No, the CBO didn't engage in double-counting--but some of the bill's promoters probably did. Yes, the doc fix will add to the deficit--but arguably it was coming anyway.

 Let's look at the question the study asked to see how it relates to the study itself:

Is it your impression that among economists who have estimated the effect of the health reform law on the budget deficit over the next ten years...will not increase the deficit...views are equally divided...think it will increase the deficit. (pg. 8, sidebar)

 Since it uses the word law rather than laws, I submit that since the major healthcare reform bill is in fact predicted to reduce the deficit (despite the impact of other healthcare-related laws), the study authors were correct in choosing 'will not increase the deficit.' It is a somewhat confusing (not to mention partisan) issue, but I think I can objectively state the study authors did not screw this question up.

*More information on the doc fix: Paul Krugman (NYT; believes it shouldn't count) and Megan McArdle (The Atlantic; believes it should count).

**Note that the bolding is my own, and not in the original report.