Democrats in Congress have been pleased with the Congressional Budget Office’s findings that both the House and Senate health care bills would reduce the deficit over 10 years. But is that assessment due to some accounting trickery in the bills? The conservative Employment Policies Institute is airing an ad on cable news networks featuring June O’Neill, former director of the CBO in the mid- to late ’90s, who says that "some politicians are using accounting gimmicks to hide... Click to read more
The Obama administration’s Recovery.gov Web site is supposed to compile data on actual, real-life jobs filled by companies and states that have received real money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the stimulus). But the site claims that jobs exist in congressional districts that don’t. This is a site, by the way, that says it "allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse." ABC News reported the discrepancies Nov. 16, pointing out that... Click to read more
Summary Would the House-passed health care bill make a tough economy worse and wipe out more jobs, as claimed in a TV ad from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? Or would it help small business and encourage economic growth, as claimed in an ad sponsored by a big labor union and other supporters of federal efforts to expand health insurance coverage? Who’s right? Will jobs be lost as businesses are required to cover their employees? Or will the economy, and jobs picture, brighten as almost all Americans... Click to read more
The AFL-CIO is running a print ad this week arguing that "the House bill gets it right" on health care. The Senate bill? Not so much, says the labor federation. Its beef is with the tax in the Senate Finance Committee bill on high-cost (a.k.a. "Cadillac") health care plans. Unions have come out against the tax, saying many of their middle-class members would be affected. The proposal calls for a 40 percent tax on the value of insurance benefits that exceed $21,000 a year for... Click to read more
The claim that the House bill would amount to "government-run health care" suffered a blow last week, when the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the so-called "public plan" in the revised bill wouldn’t offer much in the way of competition to private insurers. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from repeating the claim. For several months, we’ve been debunking assertions that Democratic health care bills call for a Canadian or British-type system in... Click to read more
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele takes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to task in an RNC fundraising e-mail for claiming that a tax increase isn’t a tax increase. But Steele adds some spin of his own, falsely charging that the tax in question falls on "middle class families and small businesses." The RNC mailer accuses Pelosi of using "political doublespeak to mislead the American people" and links to a clip of a CNBC interview in which the speaker is asked... Click to read more
The Wall Street Journal’s "Numbers Guy," Carl Bialik, takes a deeper look at a well-worn statistic: that the U.S. ranks 37th in the world in health system performance. His conclusion: WSJ’s Bialik, Oct. 21: Among all the numbers bandied about in the health-care debate, this ranking stands out as particularly misleading. The No. 37 figure comes from a 2000 World Health Organization report that attempted to grade nations’ health care according to five factors and assign... Click to read more
The liberal group Health Care for America Now is airing an ad that argues against a tax on high-cost employer-provided health care plans, a revenue-raising aspect of the Senate Finance Committee bill. "Some senators say they want to tax so-called ‘Cadillac’ health care plans, but those proposals will also tax the benefits of millions of middle class workers," the narrator says as an on-screen graphic pops up, claiming "40% tax on health care benefits of middle-class workers." That’s... Click to read more
Just a few days after the release of an insurance industry-backed study that found premiums would go up under the Senate health care bill, another industry-backed report has been published. Both reach the same conclusion about premiums. Both fail to take into consideration certain cost-saving measures in the Finance Committee bill. And both acknowledge that. In an earlier Wire post, we explained some of the limitations of the first report, drawn up by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the trade group American’s... Click to read more
It makes for a pretty easy day of fact-checking when the very authors of a less-than-thorough analysis of a bill come out and say, you know, that study wasn’t exactly thorough. And we didn’t pay them to say that. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main insurance industry lobby, however, did pay PricewaterhouseCoopers to take a look at certain aspects of the Senate Finance Committee health care bill – certain aspects AHIP doesn’t really like. PwC concluded that... Click to read more
