So this is a great example of how spin works. First you take a prominent conservative who claims that he knows something about health care (even if his public pronouncements on the topic, at $40K a time, are ludicrously ungrounded in reality).

Then you get his lackey to write an article about a survey.

Next you get a “liberal” MSM paper, which has printed plenty of rubbish about health care before from right wing loonies, to put it out on the op-ed page. And then it’s accepted as truth.

The article is from Newt and it calls Medicare Part D “A healthy Medicare drug plan  in The Boston Globe. And this is how you lie with surveys.

According to two recent surveys, conducted on behalf of America's Health Insurance Plans, of more than 800 randomly selected seniors enrolled in the Medicare drug benefit, 84 percent who signed up voluntarily experienced no problems enrolling; two-thirds say the benefits are worth the time and effort to evaluate their options and plans; 59 percent of self-enrolled seniors say they are saving money; and 90 percent of beneficiaries who were automatically enrolled, most of whom are poor, have had few problems getting their prescriptions.

Of course they’d have done better if they didn’t mention the survey or any details about it. As I deconstructed that survey here earlier this month, it had at least two major problems. First it didn’t ask anyone who had failed to register for Part D if they had any problems. That’s like Ford asking its new customers whether they felt happy buying a Ford, and not asking anyone who bought a Chevy or a Toyota why they didn't buy a Ford. It’s just unbelievably sloppy (or in this case deliberately misleading) research, which would get any junior market researcher fired in any real research shop. And if Ford found out that only 59% of the people who bought a Ford were happy just after they’d bought it, they’d regard that (rightly) as a complete crisis!

Secondly, the very same survey data was spun by me to prove that there were lots of problems with Medicare Part D. Recently separate research from a real research company confirmed that for the poorest most vulnerable Californians, it was a worse program than the one they were moved from. That’s the “90 percent of beneficiaries who were automatically enrolled, most of whom are poor, have had few problems getting their prescriptions”. Except even then they’re lying, sorry I meant being selective with their data, because only 80% said that the new program covered the drugs they needed, and these were people who came from Medicaid which for all its faults has pretty decent drug coverage at a mandated lower cost than Part D.

So they’re slanting the facts by ignoring data from even their own biased survey! But don’t worry. It’s Newt — so it must be true because he’s the intellectual Republican!