Details of McKinsey study expose Obamacare flimflam

Details of McKinsey study expose Obamacare flimflam

Two weeks ago, the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. released a widely reported survey that said almost a third of private-sector employers reported they will drop their employee health insurance coverage when Obamacare's government-managed insurance exchanges come online in 2014. The survey results exploded two major claims repeatedly made by Obama during and since the conclusion of the health care debate: "If you like your health plan, you can keep it" and "It will not add one penny to the deficit."

Obama and his allies reacted with fury to the McKinsey results. Obama's deputy chief of staff for policy, Nancy-Ann DeParle, called the results an "outlier" and questioned whether the survey's respondents understood the plan. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., sent McKinsey a threatening letter demanding that the firm reveal its survey methodology. And the New York Times' Paul Krugman -- ever willing to invent scurrilous charges out of whole cloth -- accused McKinsey of having "a skewed sample" or "no real data at all."

Now McKinsey is having its day and answering Obama and Obamacare apologists by posting all 29 pages of the survey questions, as well as 206 pages of cross-tabulations. It turns out that some of the unreported responses in the survey are even more damaging to Obamacare than the original McKinsey report indicated. First, far from being based upon a skewed sample, as Krugman charged, the survey reached 1,329 employers from 48 states (only North Dakota and Vermont were missed) representing every industry category and all firm sizes. Second, the respondents were exactly the type of people that will be making employer health insurance benefit decisions come 2014. The top five job descriptions of respondents were: owner, head of human resources, head of procurement, chief executive officer/president, and vice president of compensation.

Contrary to White House claims, the cross-tabs show that the more these decision makers knew about Obamacare, the more likely they are to drop their employees' health care plans. Among those most informed about how Obamacare would affect their business, 58 percent said they would either definitely or probably drop employee care. By contrast, only 16 percent of the best informed said they were planning on keeping their plans. Thirty percent were undecided.

These survey results mean Obamacare will be vastly more expensive than the Congressional Budget Office claimed. The CBO's computer models calculated Obamacare's costs on the assumption that only 7 percent of employers would drop their employee health plans. If the percentage is closer to the 30 percent, as the McKinsey survey results predict, Obamacare's price tag would rise by almost $1 trillion. To put this in terms even an Obama White House staffer can understand, the McKinsey survey makes clear that Obamacare's cost is unsustainable and the program should be repealed.