The FactCheck Wire

Cancer Rates and Unjustified Conclusions

A number of opponents of new health care legislation, most recently our old friend Betsy McCaughey on "The Daily Show," have claimed that cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. than in countries with nationalized health care. They conclude from this that the state of general health and health …
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TGIF

August traditionally may be a slow news month in the nation’s capital, but the bogus claims have continued to fly in the final full week of meteorological summer. This week, we’ve written about health care, health care and, oh yeah, more health care. An article from Aug. 21 addresses abortion …
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Republican Infighting on Health Insurance

Never shy about training its sights on fellow Republicans, the Club for Growth is going after Utah GOP Sen. Robert Bennett with a new television ad and letter-writing campaign targeting his support for a Senate health care bill. It’s not a Senate bill that has cleared any committee, such as …
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‘SpotCheck.org’? We Disagree.

In an Aug. 20 appearance on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," former New York Lt. Gov. (and health care legislation critic) Betsy McCaughey referred to our organization as "spot-check dot org," claiming we failed to adequately read the House health care bill. McCaughey is the source of the false …
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Palin vs. Obama: Death Panels

Like many disagreements in the digital age, it all started with a post on Facebook. Last Friday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin posted a note to her Facebook page and introduced a new term to the health care debate: Palin, Aug. 7: The America I know and love is not one in which …
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When Philosophy Meets Politics

We’ll wager that, unless you happen to be a practicing bioethicist, you’d never heard of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel six weeks ago. But now Emanuel, the director of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, finds himself labeled a "deadly doctor" by Betsy McCaughey in an opinion piece …
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Obama Wrong on AARP Endorsement

At his town hall event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, President Obama went too far in claiming the support of AARP: Obama: We have the AARP on board because they know this is a good deal for our seniors. … [A]nother myth that we’ve been hearing about is this notion that …
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Health Care Meets Shark Week!

Playing off Discovery Channel’s much-watched Shark Week, MoveOn.org Political Action launched a video likening health insurance companies to these predators of the sea. ⬐ Click to expand/collapse the full transcript ⬏ expand(document.getElementById(‘tet862951249′));expand(document.getElementById(‘tetlink862951249′)) Announcer: They are enormous and powerful. They prey on our weaknesses, trying to separate the healthy from the …
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There He Goes Again: Obama’s False $6,000 Claim

At a nationally televised "town hall meeting" in Portsmouth, N.H., today, President Obama repeated a claim about health care that we’ve disputed in the past. Obama: So we want – if I’m a customer, if I’m a consumer and I know that I’m overpaying $6,000 for anything else, I would immediately want …
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How to Not Prove a Point

The United Kingdom’s Department of Health may not have expected to face such harsh criticism during debate of overhauling the health care system here in the United States. As we’ve repeatedly said, neither President Obama nor the major health care bills in Congress call for replicating the U.K.’s government-run and …
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