CD-ROM Converter Service Center HSI Doubles As The GOP’s Favorite ‘Academic Think Tank’
CD-ROM Converter Service Center HSI Doubles As The GOP’s Favorite ‘Academic Think Tank’
This morning on MSNBC, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) ripped into health reform, calling legislation to introduce the a public option “crazy talk.” “You’ve seen the cost,” Cantor said, “the latest estimate being discussed here on the House plan is three trillion dollars.”
Republicans are seizing upon a study produced by HSI Network LLC to claim reform will cost $3-3.5 trillion over the next ten years. They are taking to the floor, firing off press releases, and making nonstop television appearances, using the HSI figure to demonize health reform. But we’ve seen this dog-and-pony show before, when HSI played exactly the same role in 2008. They armed John McCain with friendly numbers for his health plan, while tearing into Barack Obama’s plan.
This is how it worked: Stephen Parente, one of the owners of HSI, was tapped by McCain policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin to formulate the McCain health plan. Then over the course of the summer, Parente and his colleague at HSI Roger Feldman, who is a former Bush economist, were quoted in various friendly media outlets praising the McCain plan without noting that they had authored the plan they were analyzing:
– “Roger Feldman, a professor at the University of Minnesota who focuses on health insurance, said the Minnesota program shows that high-risk pools can work. He added that Sen. McCain ‘will have the same question — how much does he want to subsidize these plans?’” [WSJ, 6/2/08]
– “Steve Parente, a professor of finance at the University of Minnesota, estimated the effects of an earlier version of McCain’s plan, with a $4,000 tax credit. He found that even that less generous plan would increase the number of people with insurance by 23 to 27 million.” [National Review, 3/3/08]
Indeed, the McCain campaign paid $50,000 to HSI, the same firm that wrote their health plan, to produce “independent” comparisons between the McCain health plan versus Obama’s. Trying to conceal the payment, the McCain campaign reported the $50,000 as “legal consulting.” Strangely enough, the McCain campaign also paid HSI $10,000 in the final weeks of the campaign for “get out the vote consulting.”
Unsurprisingly, the HSI study found that McCain’s plan would cover “more than half of the nation’s 47 million uninsured — and two million more than the plan put forward by Senator Obama.” But as NPR has noted, the HSI study of the McCain and Obama plans was an extreme “outlier” compared to almost every major academic think tank that had surveyed the two candidates’ health plans. HSI’s model of the Obama campaign plan predicted a Federal cost more than 4 times than that predicted by the independent Tax Policy Center.
Reprising their role during the Presidential campaign, HSI is now spreading misinformation about the House health bill. The Ways and Means Committee has noted:
– The HSI analysis assumes substantial erosion of private coverage that rests on two likely false assumptions: (1) that private plans sit idly by and fail to offer products at lower prices to compete with the public option for business; and (2) that an employer shared responsibility requirement is ineffective and leads to massive dropping of ESI, despite contrary experience in Massachusetts and in today’s market where the majority of employers already offer coverage on a voluntary basis.
– The analysis says there are no offsets in the discussion draft, yet the bulk of the text consists of payment and delivery system reforms in Medicare and Medicaid that will yield hundreds of billions of dollars in savings.
In addition to serving as the GOP’s favorite health care think tank, HSI doubles as a data service conversion center. The latest “Data Conversion Special!” advertises that for $100, HSI will convert mainframe cartridges into CDs or DVDs.
Though HSI has yet to produce their actual methodology for analyzing the the House health reform bill, they certainly have a unique revenue model.
6 Responses to “CD-ROM Converter Service Center HSI Doubles As The GOP’s Favorite ‘Academic Think Tank’”
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Think of how wonderful it would be to have an analytical, fact-oriented media. Most Republican talking points, like this complete fraud of a study, could be completely disarmed if an actual BBC-style journalist were doing the interviewing.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:39 pmLee and company. Hi. Steve Parente here, co-principal of HSI. If you would like to see a response to the Dems Ways & Means accusations about lack of independence of HSI’s analysis to date, please see our response on the http://www.hsinetwork.com home page. In addition, we have received no money for this work. I’m not sure that could be said of others, particularly the PACs testifying to Congress next to me on Tuesday. For academic references to the models used and published in Health Affairs and by the Department of Health and Human Services, please see http://www.ehealthplan.org. I’m happy to talk to any journalist and will give full disclosure. I could also confirm or correct the time line you have above. STP
June 26th, 2009 at 12:27 pmOK. I went to your website and I can only describe it as odd. Nowhere on the site is there a list of staff or researchers or board members. In fact, I couldn’t find a single name on your site. Whether or not you collected money, and whether or not your data or your plan is good or preposterous, to do a study and then trot around as an impartial analyst talking about the plan is unethical and shady.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:23 pmyankeesue:
Our staff listing is here: http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/about/
June 26th, 2009 at 2:23 pmPat,
I think yankeesue was referring to HSI because I went to their site, too, and found no staff listing, and even more disconcerting is that when I hit “contact us”, I got the following error message:
The requested URL /cgi-bin/hsiform.pl was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
I’m not sure what kind of an operation they’re running, but I would hesitate to let them know my credit card number.
June 26th, 2009 at 11:50 pmPat & Yankeesue, To answer your question about odd business model, HSI is a small LLC performing health economic analyses as well as large database preparation for other researchers in the private sector as well as Universities. This should be on the company information link. Believe it or not, a lot of data from insurers, Medicare and Medicaid can still come on cartridge tape from mainframes. We usually do more than pre-process since the HSI principals and associates publish technical reports and peer-reviewed articles and know what analysts want to do with raw data and can provide that as a value added service if requested. Those articles, listed under ‘Reference Desk’ are the best way to see who is involved with HSI and contact info listed. The site, as you can tell, is ancient. All of our revenue is contract research by referral or request for proposals from private and public clients. We deal with terabytes of very private data and never can use the web as tool to touch any of it, by contract with clients. for example, in a recent project (now ended), we were the data custodian for an EPA study with Johns Hopkins linking air pollutants to illnesses by Medicare recipients. Every client reserves the right to make their analysis public. Usually we do that through peer-reviewed publications, not our vintage 1997 web site. The McCain campaign was the one exception until the posting of the ARCOLA estimates. You should know, the original econometric model for the estimates was published in the Peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs in 2005. CBO and other private firms usually are not that forthcoming with their methodologies. Many small contract research shops like ours don’t even have a web site because their credentials are the CVs of the investigators. Put another way, the data conversion page – which is pretty sad and I’ll admit it – makes no direct $$. But, the subsequent referral phone calls do to this day. Data conversion and analysis is not so wierd a connection because the data in health services research, outside of clinical trials, is typically large secondary databases (we have a paper on that too as it relates to Medicare). If you can’t read it, you can’t do the analysis. So, if you have an RFP or a proposed work scope, we would be happy to provide more information about the firm besides the info that can be gleened from the reference desk. Also, you could just call the phone number and email us too. STP
June 27th, 2009 at 4:45 pm