Democrats have seized on the growing controversy over the flawed McKinsey and Company survey on employer-based health insurance, demanding that the firm release background information on the survey, including the methodology the firm used in conducting. The survey found that nearly a third of employers it surveyed would discontinue offering health insurance to their employees when the Affordable Care Act is fully operable. That conclusion is contradicted by a handful of other studies and by direct experience in Massachusetts, where a similar program hasn't affected employer-based insurance.
Questions about the survey intensified when TPM reported internal dissent at McKinsey over the study and how it was conducted. Greg Sargent reports that House Dems are pushing McKinsey to come clean on the survey's methodology.
House Dems have privately pushed McKinsey to explain why McKinsey can’t release the information, given that McKinsey has confirmed to them that it did not do the study for any outside client. McKinsey did the study for its own purposes, the company informed Democrats. But in a bizarre development, the firm has continued to tell them that the information was proprietary and that it won’t be released, I’m told.
This has Dems asking why the firm won’t release the study’s methodology, given that there’s no outside client who paid for the study and is demanding that it remain confidential. As the White House points out, its findings are at odds with other studies conducted by independent organizations.
“Their findings are so off base that we naturally asked to see who they surveyed and what they asked,” Josh Drobnyk, a spokesman for Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee tells me. “The fact that they are not releasing that information obviously calls into question the results.”
House Dems intend to ratchet things up firther in the days ahead: They will be sending a formal letter to McKinsey requesting the release of the study’s methodology, sources tell me, which is likely to generate a whole new round of media scrutiny on the company’s refusal to divulge the data.
Hopefully that's true. Speaker John Boehner is using the study as a political bludgeon against President Obama and the ACA. Not a lot of the traditional media has been too proactive in actually questioning what Republicans tell them. But maybe there's some hope in this case in that it was TIME's Kate Pickert, writing at the Swampland blog to start talking about the real problems with this study.