How Politico Operates As A Gossip Rag For Lobbyists

Congress may have spent most of the last few weeks out of session. But despite lawmakers decamping from Washington for their home districts, rest assured that the swamp remains alive and well.

A recent story in Politico provides yet another example of how K Street lobbying works — with the former serving as the free publicity arm of the latter. The publication ran a story about hospitals purportedly incurring large losses without including any explanation of or justification for its claims. If there’s a more obvious way to shill for the organizations potentially paying thousands of dollars for subscriptions to one’s publication, I have yet to see it.

Unproven Premise

At issue in the article: two Medicaid-related provisions of last year’s budget reconciliation bill. The first one involves provider taxes, which most states assess on various groups of medical practitioners (including hospitals) as a fancy way of attracting additional federal matching dollars from Washington. The second involves state-directed payments, supplemental payments that Medicaid programs make — often to hospitals, and often with the state share of the payments financed via provider taxes or similar budgetary gimmicks designed to shift funding from the states to Washington.

The Politico article predicts catastrophe for hospitals:

Hospitals thought losing hundreds of billions in Medicaid funding through GOP-led cuts last year was bad. But coming regulations from the Trump administration could slash their funding even deeper than Congress did. Two recently proposed rules from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS] would cost hospitals hundreds of billions of dollars more, hospital executives told Politico. …

Hospitals say CMS’ rules restricting state taxes and payments go further than what Congress intended. Hospitals expected to lose $340 billion through 2034 after Congress passed the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act last year. If the rules are finalized as proposed, they would generate $756 billion in savings to the federal government and $265 billion in savings to states through 2035. Or as hospitals see it, they’re losing $681 billion more than they expected.

It sounds frightening — which is in many respects the point. Because the article itself includes precious little evidence of the problem.

Does Politico ever explain exactly what in the proposed rules would inflict the supposed “extra” $681 billion in losses on hospitals through 2035? Nope. For that matter, did the reporters in question ever actually read the rules? Given one of the two reporters’ history of not paying attention to a report, and then re-writing the story to cover his tracks after I pointed out the inaccuracies rooted in that ignorance, I highly doubt it. (For whatever it’s worth, I read the proposed rule on state-directed payments shortly after its release in May; I didn’t get around to reading July’s proposed rule on provider taxes.)

The reporters don’t even include any type of citation, source, or math to explain where the $681 billion figure came from. That absence is part and parcel of the larger problem: The entire article is based on a premise that the authors did not bother to explain, elaborate, or justify. Essentially, their “reporting” amounts to: Hospital executives told us this is a problem — therefore, it must be true!

Access Porn

The article’s questionable premise exemplifies Politico’s role and function. Despite any hype about its “Pro” service, its reporters often demonstrate that they don’t have any particular policy chops or expertise. If they did, they could have written the hospital story to include, you know, actual evidence to support their claims.

Instead, Politico seemingly acts as a gossip rag — access porn for K Street “insiders.” A story, apparently planted by special interest group appears in the publication — in this case hospitals attempting to obtain regulatory relief from the administration as it finalizes rules implementing last year’s budget bill. In other cases, Politico reporters appear to launder negative stories that lobbyists might not necessarily want their public fingerprints on.

Therein lies Politico’s apparent business model. No one in his right mind would pay thousands of dollars per year to access such a shoddily written and thinly sourced story as the hospital “analysis.” But lobbyists ostensibly do so anyway, perhaps because they believe they get preferential treatment when it comes to planting material in stories in which the reporters accept premises without specific evidence.

The best thing that can be said about this access porn is that taxpayers are no longer paying for it. Notwithstanding that fact, it still doesn’t speak well of the culture that persists in Washington, or of the state of modern journalism.