The factcheckers at FactCheck.org are continuing to debunk the bunk.
When the Rick Perry campaign started picking up the illogical conclusions of the latest Beacon Hill Institute study, the issue started getting national attention. The FactCheck.org reporters started checking around, and found an inconvenient fact:
Massachusetts’ unemployment rate mirrored the nation’s back in April 2006, when the law was enacted — 4.8 percent for the state compared with 4.7 percent for the nation. But the state has fared better than the U.S. overall since. Its rate is now 7.4 percent, compared with 9.1 percent for the country. Of course, the Beacon Hill study claims the state would be doing even better.
They got the study’s authors to admit that their projected job loss figure that got all the headlines is just over half a percent of all jobs in the state, and that a survey methodology would be more accurate than just projecting based on a line on a chart. Mike Widmer of Mass Taxpayer’s Foundation said it best:
“Widmer also doesn’t buy the Beacon Hill study. “There is no evidence to conclude that Massachusetts health reform has cost jobs,” he said.
Case closed.
-Brian Rosman
Pingback: FactCheck.org slams down Beacon Hill Institute “RomneyCare Lost Jobs” Study | « JHPPL News and Notes
Yes, it looked like the Beacon Hill report projected MA health and human service costs by fitting a regression line to the trend in earlier years (1997-2005) and trending it forward to 2009, with no adjustment for anything else that might have happened in the world beside MA health reform. Assigning causation for the change in trend to MA health reform is outrageously irresponsible.
Taking another slightly less simplistic approach, if I take the 2005 health and human service costs from the Beacon Hill report and trend them forward using the CMS trend in National Health Expenditures from 2005-2009, it looks like total actual MA health and human spending in 2006-2009 was $700 million LOWER than projected for those years.
ron paul is just the ross perot of this decade. he likes to make noise and causes more harm than good.
rick perry is just ensuring that no american will ever consider voting for a texan again.
the evangelicals are unchristlike bigots that hate mormons so much that they make up issues like romneycare to conceal the fact that they hate mormons.
the question is do the evangelicals hate them enough to repeat the mistakes from the last election which put Obama in the whitehouse?
the evangelicals are stuck having to choose to vote for a mormon or put a muslim, that claims to be christian, in the whitehouse a 2nd time.
sounds like an easy choice to me.
“put a Muslim that claims to be Christian in the Whitehouse…”
May sound like an easy choice to you, but you sound like and easily led moron to me.