In releasing details of its new Obamacare-related health insurance premiums Thursday, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina posted on its website the following chart.

bluecrosschart090513The chart documents a wide range of health insurance premium costs for customers of different ages seeking different levels of coverage. It does not show, nor does it purport to show, the price actual consumers will pay for health care coverage. The federal government promises subsidies that will help many Americans cover some of — and, in many cases, much of — those premium costs. Nor does the chart give any indication of how this range of premiums would compare to the cost of health insurance coverage a comparably situated consumer would have been able to purchase before Obamacare.

There are several ways news media outlets could have chosen to cover this information. Most punted to the Blue Cross press release, or to initial wire service reports about the press release, and focused only on the range of $145 to $947 per month in possible premiums. Carolina Journal went further in trying to determine how the new premiums compared to comparable premiums for current health care coverage. Using calculations supplied by the Manhattan Institute, CJ reported that the premium increase for an available low-cost plan amounted to 80 percent. The CJ report focused on the increase in premium cost, but did not focus on the price consumers will pay to their insurers. Reporter Dan Way sought information about subsidies. Read on to discover why he did not factor subsidies into his equation.

The News & Observer took a different approach, downplaying (to put it charitably) premium increases and focusing instead on the likely impact of government subsidies to alleviate the impact of those increases. In doing so, the newspaper faced the inconvenient fact that neither the Blue Cross chart nor the material supporting that chart on the insurer’s website offered any hard data that would have produced a revised version of the chart above.

Rather than offer readers a glimpse at Blue Cross’ chart, the N&O printed this:

Blue Cross’ sampling of subsidized rates

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina released a sampling of subsidized rates it will offer under the Affordable Care Act.

The table below shows monthly premiums for individuals at different ages and income levels. The premiums are presented as a range because Blue Cross customers will be able to choose from multiple plans.

Premiums shown below are for the “bronze” level of coverage, which has the lowest premiums. Bronze plans will pay 60 percent of covered benefits, while enrollees will pay the remaining 40 percent through cost-sharing such as deductibles, copayments and coinsurance. The premiums are shown for non-smokers.

Other coverage levels are Silver (70/30 percent), Gold (80/20 percent) and Platinum (90/10 percent). All plans, regardless of levels, provide the same essential benefits.

Age Wage Monthly premium
25 $20,000 $42.44–$76.96
25 $30,000 $166.41–$201.13
25 $40,000 $184.99–$219.71 (qualifies for zero subsidy)
40 $20,000 $30.47–$74.66
40 $30,000 $154.72–$198.91
40 $40,000 $235.47–$279.66 (qualifies for zero subsidy)
60 $20,000 $0–$62.68
60 $30,000 $93.39–$187.15
60 $40,000 $200.72–$294.57

Sources: Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Kaiser Family Foundation

Read only the N&O in the morning, and this is the only chart you will have seen.

nandobluecrossWhile the N&O‘s decision to de-emphasize cost increases can be questioned, since that does seem to be the “headline news” from Blue Cross’ release, the newspaper’s interest in factoring in the impact of government subsidies is certainly defensible. Many people will pay a discounted price for higher-cost health care premiums, and it makes sense to try to get a handle on the extent and impact of those discounts.

What is indefensible is the way in which the information is presented. Read both the explanatory text and the chart itself, and any reasonable person would surmise that the information comes directly from Blue Cross. The only indication that the N&O has consulted another source is the mention of Kaiser Family Foundation after Blue Cross in the source list below the chart. What the newspaper fails to indicate is that its chart appears to be based on a combination of Blue Cross data and calculations the N&O made from a tool available at the Kaiser Family Foundation website. There is no valid excuse for the newspaper not to have warned readers that the data presented to them resulted from the N&O‘s handiwork, not the calculations of Blue Cross itself.

Why is this important? Because Blue Cross took great pains to tell Carolina Journal that government subsidies were based on so many variables that it would have been hard to come up with good numbers to estimate the actual impact of the subsidies on average consumer prices. Blue Cross did not provide any kind of “sampling of subsidized rates,” and for the N&O to suggest otherwise is less than professional.