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In the last week, several studies (okay, one lobbyist press release packaged as a “study” and the other a real study) have made a splash.

The first, the Price Waterhouse “study” for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) on implications of moving toward a public option and universal coverage.

The other, the month’s old Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examination of the long term economic implications of acting to mitigate climate change via the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act.

While one was simply a lobbyist-driven disinformation effort and the other an attempt at a serious examination, these two have several fundamental similarities that illuminate problems in achieving a meaningful public (whether in the general public or in the political arena) dialogue over the critical issues of health care and climate change.

What are those ‘similarities’?

1. There is a bit of Mr Bill from Saturday Night Live in reporting from these. In essence, OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! No matter what serious understanding of these analyses might suggest, there data engendered a bit of ‘the sky is falling reporting’. [Note, video below is from prior to Katrina.]
2. As for that reporting, both were poorly reported in The Washington Post. The Post put the Price Waterhouse AHIP report above the cover, on the front page, without serious examination of the study’s parameters which (quite seriously) skewed its results. The Washington Post entitled its story Cap-and-Trade Would Slow Economy, CBO Chief Says, with no meaningful examination of how (based below) the CBO’s study falls short of providing what any reasonable person would consider an appropriate path toward accounting the costs and benefits of any policy option.
3. Both Price Waterhouse and the CBO fail on multiple levels, most significantly a skewed cost-benefit accounting by tallying costs fully while ignoring significant benefits. After the AHIP report had already made quite a splash (including that front page Post coverage), Price Waterhouse released a statement explaining that they had left out significant elements that would lower costs (provide benefits).  The CBO study explicitly did not consider the avoided costs due to reducing the impacts of catastrophic climate change.
4. Both Price Waterhouse and CBO work provide ammunition for those seeking to mislead the public and the political process, undermining necessary change to strengthen the United States and increase the prospects for today’s and tomorrow’s Americans.

There is that old adage, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”.  The AHIP Price Waterhouse ‘study’ seems to merit all three.   The CBO work, on the other hand, seems to fall only in the third category, underlining the importance of reading (and understanding) footnotes to place the study in context.

The real issue, of course, comes from failures in the media process and inadequate critical review. With any serious, objective review, it is hard to see the justification for giving an AHIP-backed “study” (essentially a lobbyist press release) space in a newspaper of record, let alone giving it prominent front page coverage.

The CBO study was caveated and testimony last week clearly stated that the work didn’t coverage the full range of issues (“CBO Director Douglas W. Elmendorf emphasized that his estimates contained significant uncertainties and “do not include any benefits from averting climate change,””). Traditional media reporting, however, doesn’t seem to have peeked between the wizard’s curtain of economic analysis to see how CBO processes can skew results (and how counting rules can drive the US toward sub-optimal policy) and, probably even more importantly, how the CBO processes exclude a huge range of benefits that, if included, would flip the CBO results from ‘some costs’ to ‘massive benefits’ from acting to mitigate climate change.

In any event, when it came to AHIP’s Price Waterhouse ‘study’ relative to health care policy and CBO’s examination (and testimony about) the costs/benefits of action to mitigate climate change, The Washington Post (sigh, and too many ‘traditional media’ outlets) failed its readership and the general policy discussion.  And these failures helped create Mr Bill “Oh, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” moments for at least some in the critical health care reform and clean energy/climate change mitigation arenas.

Note:  This is a somewhat unfair comparison. The CBO study has serious problems, but these do not seem to be from any intention to create a misperception or purposefully skew the discussion. The CBO works with a scoring system that creates confusion and worked within a stove-piped analysis, that doesn’t enable a robust examination of costs and benefits. The Price Waterhouse work, on the other hand, is perhaps more appropriately compared to the SAIC “studies” released by the National Association of Manufacturers as part of their battle to prevent action to mitigate climate change. Like Price Waterhouse’s press release highlighting the limited nature of their work (and how they had excluded significant components of health care reform plans in their work), the SAIC “studies” had footnotes that explicitly absolved SAIC of any responsibility for the results and conclusions. That footnote: “The input assumptions, opinion and recommendations are those of ACCF and NAM, and do not necessarily represent the views of SAIC.”

NOTE 2: The CBO process seems to have an even more seriously fundamental flaw, which is a seeming embrace of an economic perspective with blinders to science and where science is on the risks of catastrophic climate change.  Brad Johnson of the Wonkroom highlights a rather terrifying element of the CBO testimony:

As a consequence, a relatively pessimistic estimate for the loss in projected real gross domestic product is about 3 percent for warming of about 7° Fahrenheit (F) by 2100.  … “the risk of catastrophic outcomes associated with about 11°F of warming by 2100? gives a projected “loss equivalent to about 5 percent of U.S. output and, because of substantially larger losses in a number of other countries, a loss of about 10 percent of global output.”

This is jaw dropping. Does anyone at CBO have the slightest understanding of the potential real-world implications of seven degrees of warming? Anyone at all?  For a robust discussion, see Brad’s stellar work.  In short, however, this sort of warming would massively disrupt US agriculture, have significant portions of America’s coastal areas awash due to rising seas (with huge infrastructure costs from lost cities and ports, industrial and transportation infrastructure lost, etc), significantly increased forest fires, … And, well, again, see Brad’s sobering work.  It seems that the CBO should pay a bit of attention to the US Climate Change Research Program and perhaps actually read (highlighter in hand) the report on Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.   Perhaps spending some time with science and facts might lead CBO to revisit their quite odd (rather bizarre) results.

Today is Blog Action Day, with thousands of blogs discussing global warming.

For amusement, another “Mr Bill” related to environmental issues …