The Bush administration has a number of really annoying habits, but the most Orwellian of their practices is changing government reports for political and public relations purposes.
Chris Mooney and Kevin Drum are noting that the latest in a long line of controversial edits has recently been used to “touch up” an HHS report on race, poverty, and health. It’s pretty disturbing.
The Department of Health and Human Services is required to produce annual reports on racial disparities in health care. When the agency completed last year’s report, top Bush administration officials intervened to make the results look less damaging.
The original report, according to a Washington Post article, documented how and why minorities receive less care, and less high-quality care, than whites, across a broad range of diseases.
“The National Healthcare Disparities Report was intended by HHS to be a comprehensive look at the scope and reasons for inequalities in health care,” the Post reported. “A number of studies have shown that even among people with identical diseases and the same income level, minorities are less likely to be diagnosed promptly and more likely to receive sub-optimal care. Documented disparities exist in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, heart disease, AIDS, diabetes, pediatric illness, mental disorders and other conditions. They also exist in surgical procedures and nursing home services.”
But the administration was concerned that this accurate information might make them look bad. Instead of changing the administration’s policy, they changed the report.
In fact, the minority investigative staff of the House Committee on Government Reform prepared a tremendous report documenting exactly how the White House manipulated the original HHS document to suit their own purposes.
Here’s a great paragraph from the committee report:
The scientists’ draft concluded that “disparities come at a personal and societal price,” including lost productivity, needless disability, and early death. The final version drops this conclusion and replaces it with the finding that “some ‘priority populations’ do as well or better than the general population in some aspects of health care.” As an example, the executive summary highlights that “American Indians/Alaska Natives have a lower death rate from all cancers.”
In other words, the White House downplayed (and omitted) results showing serious racial disparities and hand-picked isolated data to make the problems seem innocuous. As Kevin Drum noted, “This is sort of like commissioning a report on income disparities and highlighting the fact that blacks do very well in the area of professional basketball.”
The Washington Post article about this, though relegated to page A17 where it’s likely to go unnoticed, had a few more juicy details, including the White House omitting references in the original text to “national problems” in this public health care crisis. Even worse, the original version defined “disparity” and mentioned it 30 times in the “key findings” section — the edited version mentioned the word only twice in that section and left it undefined.
The Post quoted Karen Migdail, a spokeswoman at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the HHS unit that drafted the report, as saying, “That’s just the way Secretary Thompson wants to create change. The idea is not to say, ‘We failed, we failed, we failed,’ but to say, ‘We improved, we improved, we improved.'”
But that’s just the point; they haven’t improved anything. The health care crisis, particularly with regards to the care minorities receive in this country, is getting worse. The administration has ignored the problem altogether. Administration wants to “create change” by fudging government reports, not by actually helping improve the system that shortchanges millions of American families on matters of life and death.
“In effect, they whitewashed the issue away, even though they were told that health care disparities are a national problem and pervasive and carry a significant personal and societal price,” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) explained. “It’s hard not to reach the obvious result that HHS is wishing the problem away.”
And let’s not forget that this is not an isolated incident. The Bush administration has demonstrated a disturbing tendency to take government reports and either “change” them before they’re available to the public, or get rid of the reports all together, for three years now.