When Two or More Journalists Gather, Someone Spills His Math

Guy by the name of Deroy Murdock writes a political column distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.

He recently wrote a column that criticized “ObamaCare,” as opponents like to refer to proposals for health care reform.

The problem was, his criticism focused on the cost of a new health care plan, which required him to use math.

And, as we have all learned, there are three kinds of journalists; those who can do math, and those who can't.

Anyway, Murdock did what any advocate would do by using percentages to emphasize increased costs of various government insurance programs (e.g., Medicare).

Percentages can sound really scary, even if the real numbers are quite small.

For example, a local tax rate for parks might increase from 0.005 percent to 0.01 percent and cost you a few bucks a year. But if you explain that's a 100 PERCENT INCREASE, it sounds scarier.

And Mr. Murdock wanted things to sound scary. Unfortunately, his math skills were pretty scary, too.

For example, he offered an anecdote about “an Obama-like program [in Massachusetts] launched in 2006 by then-GOP Gov. Willard Mitt Romney.”

That health care program, Mr. Murdock reported, “was supposed to cost $472 million in fiscal year 2008. That year's real tally was $628 million, 120 percent above what Bay State residents were prepared to pay.”

Let's see ... a 100 percent increase is double ... so a 100 percent increase on $472 million would raise the cost to $944 million ... but the cost went up to only $628 million. So it couldn't be a 120 percent increase.

For those of you keeping score at  home, that's actually an increase of 33 percent. That is, the amount of increase ($156 million) is about one-third of the original cost ($472 million). That's how you figure a percentage increase.

Mr. Murdock's other calculations started with the assumption that when a number doubles, that's a 200 percent increase. It's not, of course; that's an increase of 100 percent. When a number triples, that's a 200 percent increase, etc.

But he reports that when Medicare was launched in 1965, proponents projected that Part A, the hospital entitlement program, would cost $9 billion in 1990. It actually cost $67 billion, Murdock says, “outpacing forecasts by 744 percent.”