The WSJ on the ACA, cont.

Early this month, I looked at a couple of Wall Street Journal stories that emphasized the negative in the Affordable Care Act rollout and wondered whether the WSJ healthcare coverage wasn't Foxifying a bit. One emphasized the premium hike for a relatively small subset of people subject to the individual mandate (and without employer-provided insurance), and one aggregated and exaggerated a series of "blows" to the law, most of which were old news.

Healthcare reporter Louise Radnofsky was on both bylines. She's a good reporter. Her coverage over time has been balanced.*

But as the rollout of the ACA exchanges looms, I wonder whether WSJ news editing is tilting the emphasis on ACA coverage generally [ [UPDATE: I have spoken to someone at the Journal, whose word I trust, who assures me that editors area not imposing a political agenda on reporters. I regret speculating about motive without information.].

Today, Project Millennial blogger Mike Miesen flags another questionable WSJ framing of ACA news that had also registered with me this morning:

But the framing of the results may give the typical reader a false impression of what’s actually transpired. From an article by Melinda Beck in the Wall Street Journal titled “Mixed Results in Health Pilot Plan”:

All of the 32 health systems in the so-called Pioneer Accountable Care Organization program improved patient care on quality measures such as cancer screenings and controlling blood pressure, according to data to be released Tuesday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But only 18 of the 32 managed to lower costs for the Medicare patients they treated—a major goal of the effort. Two hospitals lost money on the program in the first year.

Does that sound mixed to you? Let’s restate it a bit, with two charts for emphasis:

All of the 32 health systems in the so-called Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (PACO) program improved patient care on quality measures such as cancer screenings and controlling blood pressure. 18 (56% of PACOs) managed to lower costs for the Medicare patients they treated, saving $140 million in costs; of that, they’ll receive $76 million, and $33 million will be returned to the Medicare Trust Fund. Only two of the 32 PACOs lost money in the first year.

Personally, I have my own worries about Campbell's Law, or David Simon's rule of statistics, with regard to those complex performance measures that determine ACO pay.  But I digress. I'll keep an eye on WSJ ACA coverage  in the coming months.
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*On the small biz side, before the employer mandate was postponed, Sara Needleman and Emily Maltby reported quite sympathetically in late May about small employers wrestling with the coverage imperative and mostly striving to do the right thing.