{"id":8906,"date":"2014-07-25T10:24:42","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T14:24:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=8906"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:43:07","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:43:07","slug":"little-town-i-live-in-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2014\/07\/little-town-i-live-in-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Little Town I Live In: 10"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press just released a story with the headline, “Millions in insurance rebates coming to Carolinas<\/a>.”\u00a0 The story talks about 2013 health insurance premiums that are considered overcharges, based on provisions of The Affordable Care Act.\u00a0 But the writing of the story is rather flawed.\u00a0 The writer calculates “an average refund of $92 per family” in South Carolina, by dividing the total amount being refunded by the total number of consumers that will get a refund.\u00a0 This glosses over the fact that only 387,000 consumers (out of a total population of over 14 million) in North and South Carolina will be getting any kind of refund this year.<\/p>\n

But I am burying the lead, as they say.\u00a0 The real point of this post is the headline itself.\u00a0 Most news outlets that published this story online ran the following headline (which was no doubt supplied by The Associated Press):<\/p>\n

Millions in insurance rebates coming to Carolinas<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

WXII<\/a> in Winston-Salem thought we should know more about the insurance:<\/p>\n

Millions in health insurance rebates coming to Carolinas<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Time-Warner Cable<\/a> of Charlotte added capital letters and units of measurement:<\/p>\n

Millions of Dollars in Insurance Rebates Coming to Carolinas<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

But our Asheville Citizen-Times<\/a> decided to change the very facts of the story:<\/p>\n

Health insurance rebates coming to millions in Carolinas<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Which isn’t true.\u00a0 Some people in this little town have too much time on their hands.  I won’t say who.<\/p>\n

__________<\/p>\n

Update: An hour or so after I posted a comment on The Citizen-Times pointing out the misleading headline, the newspaper (to its credit) changed the headline to:<\/p>\n

Health insurance rebates coming to consumers in Carolinas<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

To some<\/em> consumers, yes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press just released a story with the headline, “Millions in insurance rebates coming to Carolinas.”\u00a0 The story talks about 2013 health insurance premiums that are considered overcharges, based on provisions of The Affordable Care Act.\u00a0 But the writing … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8906"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8918,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8906\/revisions\/8918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}