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Fresh Squeezed Politics - March On Politics Blog

Rubio tweet on health care repeated misinformation

Posted Mar 19, 2010 by William March

Updated Mar 19, 2010 at 05:02 PM

“New Journal of Medicine study/survey found 47% of primary care physicians will leave the profession if Obamacare is passed. #sayfie #tcot
10:26 PM Mar 16th,” Marco Rubio, an avid Twitter user, said in a tweet earlier this week sent to his more than 10,000 followers.

Rubio was repeating a story that caught fire this week on conservative news sites and Fox News—that the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine had published a survey saying 47 percent of physicians would leave their careers, or try to, if health care reform passed.

Only one problem—it wasn’t true.

“It was either mistakenly sloppy or intentionally sloppy reporting,” said Karen Buckley, a spokeswoman for NEJM.

Here’s what did happen:

In addition to its journal containing peer-reviewed papers on scientific research, NEJM also posts a web site called “Career Center” with advertising content, produced by its advertisers, much of it aimed at recruiting doctors. Because it’s advertising, NEJM doesn’t review or verify the material. One of the advertisers published the results of what it said were a survey on that web site, claiming the doctors would leave.

CNSNews.com, which calls itself “an alternative to the liberal media” and focuses on stories it says are “unreported or misreported,” posted a story that linked to the survey, attributing it to the NEJM.

“We contacted them and told them they’d made a mistake and they didn’t respond,” Buckley said. “People picked it up and ran with it. Fox ran it on every channel.”

Buckley said the survey has been taken down from the web site and replaced by a statement emphasizing that the content there is not produced by the NEJM.

MOP has asked the Rubio campaign for a response, and will update when it comes.
________________
Update: Rubio campaign spokesman Alex Burgos responds that the survey “is in line with an Investors Business Daily poll of 1300+ physicians taken late last year.” That poll, he noted, said, “Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted.”

The IBD poll, however, was a voluntary response, mail-in poll, considered unreliable and unscientific by pollsters, because responses aren’t random. IBD says it sent questionnaires to 26,000 doctors, of whom 1,476 responded—of those, a hundred were retired, leaving 1,376.

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