Margaret Wente’s column on Monday about the passage of the Affordable Care Act in the US is conclusive proof that a female newspaper columnist is just as likely as a male blogger to make a hash of the facts to advance a “provocative” argument.

I’ve been stewing over this ridiculous column all week, because (a) I spend far too much time reading blogs about US healthcare; (b) it’s not merely wrong in a “oh, she must not have read such and such” way but in an “omitting clearly relevant basic facts to colour the argument” way; and (c) the errors and tendencies it displays are typical of the Globe’s US coverage generally these days, especially in the hands of Konrad Yakabuski.

This worries me. Frankly, I’m reluctant to treat the Globe as a paper of record anymore, because the fact-checking and editing is so obviously subpar.

The Economist, by comparison, is obviously biased in its coverage of US politics toward really wishing they could support the Republicans as a pro-market, pro-trade party, and therefore being overly evenhanded in the face of truly egregious nutjobbery. But they still basically get the facts right.

The Globe just gets things wrong. And even their point of view isn’t consistent. One memorable Yakabuski piece said “HCR won’t work because it doesn’t have government-run insurance” but then quoted experts from the libertarian Cato Institute as authorities on how badly it wouldn’t work. It’s just nonsensical. I think perhaps they are trying to be cutely contrarian and not succumb to Obama-rama like the rest of us. It doesn’t work.

But Wente’s piece was really a low point. So: for Canadians who don’t want to turn over their life to Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn, here’s why:

American liberals are giddy over Barack Obama’s hard-won health-care victory. Only weeks ago, they were in despair over his failure to live up to his early promise, but now his fortunes have been miraculously resurrected. They’re are already predicting that Obamacare will seal his place in history as one of the greatest presidents of all time.

OK, fine, nothing to complain about here. (Except for the “they’re are” — perhaps this really wasn’t edited at all.)

Canadians are pretty happy, too. At last, the U.S. has come around to universal coverage. Obamacare fixes the terrible injustice of people who can’t get health insurance because they’re already sick, and people who lose their coverage when they lose their jobs. From the Canadian point of view, Obamacare is a political and moral triumph (to say nothing of a vindication of our own superiority).

Not really wrong, per se, but this is clearly tendentious and, again, trying too hard to be cutely contrarian. I’m not sure what her point is with the snark: if we agree that this was a terrible injustice, which it was, then why is it so wrong to feel superior about not having suffered it for 45 or so extra years? And why is it wrong or distasteful to be unselfishly happy that 32 million people – roughly our entire population – will now have access to health insurance? Baffling. But I digress.

But perhaps we ought to be a little less triumphant. America’s “health-care revolution” (as a Globe and Mail headline put it) entrenches two deeply destructive trends: ideological warfare without end, and the metastatic growth of U.S. debt and entitlement spending.

Not really clear why that matters to Canadians who are happy that people have healthcare coverage: we don’t have to pay for it! But there’s the thesis of the column, and where things start to go wrong.

Since FDR, every sweeping U.S. social reform – the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare – has been a bipartisan affair. Not this time. Not a single Republican voted for this bill. That’s not Mr. Obama’s fault. But it’s now clear his promise to forge a new era of postpartisan politics, where people would be reasonable and play nicely together, is dead. As David Sanger of The New York Times put it, “the approach to governing he had in mind simply will not work.”

This is facile. The reason that those previous reforms were “bipartisan” is because at the time they were passed, Republicans and Democrats both included southern segregationists, who were also more conservative. The people who voted for those reforms were, broadly, the northern liberal elements of both parties. But as the 60s ended, the southerners all became Republicans. And so the parties are much more ideologically consistent now than they were then. This is pretty basic stuff. An argument about increased polarization that ignores those facts is not worth taking seriously.

The second point is open to interpretation, and I’ll let it pass. It’s inarguably true that Republicans aren’t signing on to major initiatives and nothing bipartisan is likely to happen before the next election. But we can argue about whether Obama really cares, or whether he just recognizes that the American people like their politicians to appear to be trying really hard to be bipartisan, and therefore some good faith efforts to engage Republicans were a necessary part of the process.

Mr. Obama is also swimming against a mighty tide. Despite the passage of health reform, most Americans no longer trust the government to get things done. Obamacare is part of a bigger fight over the proper role of government that has split America in half. And even those of us who believe in universal health care might doubt the ability of bureaucrats to impose solutions to complex problems, no matter how wise and smart they are.

Trust in government does remain abnormally low. Hey, I wouldn’t trust them either after Katrina and the rest of the Bush years. But it’s not really accurate to call this a one-way trend: trust was at about this low a level in 1994, went up slightly, declined again, etc. And the fact that Obama has political opponents who represent some proportion of American society is hardly prima facie evidence that anything he does will not be successful. That’s, um, how politics works.

This whole line about bureaucrats is goofy as well. The actual reform is overwhelmingly market-based: it is largely about regulating the behaviour of private insurance companies with some principles and rules, and then providing subsidies for lower-income people to buy that insurance. And let’s put “trust” in context: if about half of Americans trust Obama on healthcare, only about one-third trust the insurance companies, who are themselves full of bureaucrats.

The new health-care legislation is a vast exercise in bureaucracy-building and social engineering, in a sector that already accounts for a mind-boggling 17 per cent of the economy. Will it produce better health outcomes? Will most Americans feel they themselves will be better off because of it? Don’t bet on it.

OK, no “evidence” is provided for the last point, so I don’t even know where to start. She’s already conceded that the bill fixes a “massive injustice”, so this seems odd. But the point about 17 per cent of the economy is a joke. The reason healthcare accounts for 17 per cent of the US economy is, largely, because of the runaway cost inflation and inefficiency that’s created by the lack of sensible regulation on insurance companies. What “bureaucracy” is created by this legislation is unlikely to add to that in any meaningful way.

What you can bet on is that Obamacare will fail miserably at containing costs. Americans already spend 60 per cent more money on health care per capita than we do. Yet, this legislation will do nothing to check the power of trial lawyers, unions, Big Pharma or doctors. It does nothing to check consumer demand for more and better treatments. (And if it did, Americans really would revolt.) Instead of containing costs, the legislation adds even more open-ended entitlement programs.

Jeez. This again. First, the point of the bill was largely not to contain costs. It was to expand coverage and fix that “massive injustice.” That’s a shame, but the fact is that containing costs is politically difficult and not a single Republican was willing to vote for a bill that would contain costs. As a result, the Democrats had to buy off the interest groups and focus on coverage. Just like a Republican governor did in Massachusetts.

But reducing costs is also technically difficult: it’s not really clear what would work, especially in a fragmented system like the US’s. So the bill contains a massive array of small-bore approaches to cost-containment, with the potential to expand those over time. It also does a really important thing by letting Medicare adjust reimbursement rates based on clinical effectiveness (yeah, it hasn’t been able to do that until now — baffling).

And although the bill doesn’t address malpractice tort reforms, this is a red herring: Texas reformed its tort laws several years ago to “control costs” (really, to try to cut Democratic donors’ incomes) and the impact has been zip, nil, nada. This is a Republican talking point — which sets up the rest of the column.

The official estimate says Obamacare will cost $1-trillion over the next 10 years but will actually lower federal deficits. Don’t believe it. A more likely result, reckons Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, is that it will add at least another $562-billion to the deficit, which is already projected to reach an impressive $1.2-trillion by 2020.

This is clearly the most offensive paragraph. It’s misleading, and intentionally so. The “official estimate” that Wente dismisses was produced by the current director of the Congressional Budget Office and his staff. Citing Douglas Holtz-Eakin as a “former director of the CBO” to give him credibility without mentioning that is just obviously misleading.

It would actually be more informative to describe Holtz-Eakin as a “former McCain campaign advisor.” Holtz-Eakin’s column (Wente is more or less citing the argument he made in an op-ed in the NYTimes, which repeats arguments he’s made verbally elsewhere) on the cost of the bill should be correctly identified as a “Republican talking points memo” and not a serious economic analysis. It barely even addresses the actual costs of the bill.

What it really says is that the bill is designed to limit the amount of spending in the first 10 years by delaying implementation, while raising revenues sooner, so that the bill is fully paid for upfront and doesn’t add to the deficit. The fact that it does raise that revenue isn’t contested.

Other experts have thoroughly debunked his claims (see here), so I won’t bother continuing. But a knowledgeable observer – or a moderately critical and intelligent reader, for that matter – would not have cited Holtz-Eakin in this way. Unless their argument was more important to them than the facts. Or unless they assume that their readers won’t bother checking.

In a rousing speech a day before the vote, Mr. Obama recalled the glories of the past. “You know, naysayers said that Social Security would lead to socialism. But the men and women of Congress stood fast and created that program that lifted millions out of poverty.” What he didn’t say is that Social Security must be reformed to be sustained, but no one wants to touch it.

Social Security is solvent until about 2037. And its costs are rising roughly in line with GDP. It doesn’t need to be reformed; not today, at least. Republicans – again with the talking points – like to conflate social security with Medicare/Medicaid, which do (did!) need to be reformed to control rapid medical cost inflation.

Second, it’s not true that no-one wants to touch Social Security: Republicans do, because they want to privatize it and hand all of people’s retirement money over to Wall Street to manage. That’s why they come up with talking points like this one.

The one issue that unites America’s warring parties is their mutual refusal to address the runaway entitlements that both of them have built. Neither has the will or courage to honestly address America’s staggering debt. Neither has the nerve to tell the people that their country is living beyond its means and that, sooner or later, they’ll have to pay the piper.

Um – has she noticed that, on a party line vote, the Democrats just passed a bill that reduces Medicare funding (albeit only by stripping out oversized payments to private insurance companies), while the Republicans whipped up fears of “death panels” and refused to support Medicare cuts that they had called for as recently as two years ago?

Or that a Democratic President just appointed a deficit reduction commission that the Republicans refused to vote for in Congress (after proposing the idea!)?

Or, to be fair, that a Republican (Paul Ryan) recently released a proposal calling for massive cuts to all entitlement programs – an appalling proposal in its way, but hardly a refusal to discuss the idea? Or that Bush’s second term was crippled after he tried (and failed) to privatize Social Security?

If Mr. Obama ever takes that one on and survives, his place in history will be truly secured.

Nope, I’m pretty sure he’s good.