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.
