A report by Reed Abelson that "Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers" got front-page play in Sunday's Times.
A report by Robert Pear that "The rate of increase in health spending, 3.9 percent in 2011, was the same as in 2009 and 2010 — the lowest annual rates recorded in the 52 years the government has been collecting such data," got buried inside today's national section.
The Sunday report made a brief reference to the overall trend — "The double-digit requests in some states are being made despite evidence that overall health care costs appear to have slowed in recent years, increasing in the single digits annually as many people put off treatment because of the weak economy," it said. But it left the overall impression that health care costs are soaring, an impression contradicted by the Tuesday article.
There's an overall tendency in news — not just at the Times — to focus on the bad news rather than the good news. The two articles might have been combined into one that said, "The rate of increase in health spending is slowing to historic lows even as some small businesses or individuals purchasing health insurance are seeing increased premiums." But that might not have been attention-grabbing enough to make for a front-page news article.
The danger, however, is that commentators and policymakers see the front-page Sunday article and miss the inside-the-paper Tuesday article, and then use the headlines to draw conclusions governing everything from tax rates to defense spending. For an example of that, have a look at David Brooks' column. It appears under the headline, "Why Hagel Was Picked," but it's really a third article about health care costs, arguing that the defense budget will have to be cut because of the inexorable rise of federal health costs. "As the federal government becomes a health care state, there will have to be a generation of defense cuts that overwhelm anything in recent history," Mr. Brooks writes. He writes:
the line tracing federal health care spending looks like the slope of a jet taking off from LaGuardia. Medicare spending is set to nearly double over the next decade. This is the crucial element driving all federal spending over the next few decades and pushing federal debt to about 250 percent of G.D.P. in 30 years.
Alas for Mr. Brooks, but fortunately for the federal government, there actually is a line-chart tracing health care spending that goes along with Mr. Pear's news article. The topmost charts the "annual increase in national health expenditures," not the expenditures themselves (the difference is worth thinking about), but the important point is that the slope of the increases looks less like the slope of a jet "taking off from LaGuardia" than the slope of a jet coming in for a bumpy landing at LaGuardia.
Maybe instead of slashing the defense budget on the predictions of health care spending "over the next few decades," we should watch and wait and see what happens. We might be pleasantly surprised that growth in health care costs won't be as bad as predicted. It wouldn't be the first time that an alarmist prediction about something 20 or 30 years down the road turns out to be false. That's not to say that the government shouldn't do what it can immediately, within reason, to keep down expenditures on either health care or defense, and to avert a debt crisis in the future. It should. But it is to suggest that, contrary to the Times' decision on front-page placement, the bigger story here may be the one about slowing costs, not about rising costs.