Ho Hum. More Administration Water-Carrying By The New York Times

I suppose news stories in the New York Times being indistinguishable from Obama administration handouts is no longer news worth printing in a blog like mine, but even so I found Peter Baker’s article yesterday striking in its casual reporting of highly partisan administration talking points as though they were uncontested facts.

“President Obama,” Baker writes, “tackled enduring inequality” on Tuesday, “in this case economic disparity based on gender.” Given the not only widely disputed (even by the Washington Post, over and over) and even derided “77 cents on the dollar” old feminist pop propaganda the president trotted out to justify his rather toothless executive order, this effort was quickly reduced to embarrassing humor when Jay Carney, White House spokesman, could not explain the very sort of pay disparity among White House staffers that is claimed to be the essence of that “enduring inequality.”

“Certainly,” Baker continued, “Mr. Obama can point to landmark actions from his first term, most notably his health care program, the most significant expansion of the social safety net since the Johnson era.”

Certainly? On the contrary, certainly not. “The most significant expansion of the social safety net since the Johnson era” is certainly what the president intended, and what he and his partisan supporters claim he has achieved, but a newspaper should be able to distinguish intent from effect, and if anything is certain it is that it is far too early to proclaim that the social safety net has in fact been significantly expanded. So far, in fact, it may have actually contracted. That is, it is entirely possible that as of the close of the open enrollment period most people have lost their insurance than have gained it on the new Obamacare exchanges. The administration, of course, isn’t telling how many people who have “enrolled” on the exchanges have actually paid or how many of them were previously uninsured, but the two most extensive surveys to date — by McKinsey and Rand — estimate that the percentage of previously insured signing up for coverage on the exchanges ranges from about 25% (McKinsey) to 30% (Rand). A good discussion of the Rand study was just posted by Avik Roy of Forbes, here.

No one has followed the Obamacare debate more closely or written about it more wisely than Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle. Surveying all the available data in the first week of March she concluded:

With one month to go, most of the uninsured still hadn’t done anything. Worse, the number of previously insured people who had not enrolled in a qualified health plan by the end of February was almost twice the number of previously uninsured people who had. That’s the opposite of the effect this law was supposed to have.

For Peter Baker and the New York Times, however, there remains no distinction between what effect the law was supposed to have and what effect it has had.