The president got a key point wrong when he attacked Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan for Medicare.
Read more about Obama’s claims in “Fall Preview: Obama vs. Romney (and Ryan),” April 6.
Stories by Lori Robertson
Director, FactCheck.org
It’s a Job-Killer?
Claims that the health care law kills jobs are greatly exaggerated.
Read more about the claim in our Feb. 21 article, “GOP’s ‘Job-Killing’ Whopper, Again.”
The Contraception Conundrum
Is free contraception coverage revenue neutral, or does it increase insurance premiums? The evidence is conflicting and murky.
See our Feb. 24 article, “Cloudy Contraception Costs,” for more on this issue.
Massachusetts Health Care Overhaul
The Massachusetts health care law signed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney did not create a “government-run” system, as some critics have said. But Romney wrongly claims everyone under his law was covered by private insurance, ignoring his own expansion of Medicaid.
Read more in our Jan. 20 article, “South Carolina Smackdown.”
White House Spins Women’s Health
Republicans are right: The White House is greatly exaggerating when it says that “women, in particular,” benefit from a prevention fund that the House GOP proposes to repeal. The truth is that the fund in question wasn’t set up specifically for women’s health programs, and we could find no concrete evidence that it has paid anything to gender-specific health programs so far.
For example, the fund has paid for programs to discourage tobacco use, encourage physical fitness,
Stretching the Truth in Nebraska
Club for Growth Action is out with another attack ad on Republican Senate candidate Jon Bruning, this time stretching to paint him as a “big taxer.” Earlier this month, the group exaggerated Nebraska Attorney General Bruning’s spending record.
The latest ad says Bruning “once called for higher gas taxes and Social Security taxes.” But it doesn’t mention that he did so back in 1992 in an opinion piece in the University of Nebraska’s Daily Nebraskan,
Misleading on Premiums
Both the Republican National Committee and the Obama administration are making misleading claims about health insurance premium costs. An RNC ad falsely implies that the federal health care law is responsible for all of the $1,300 average increase in family coverage premiums last year. But at the same time, the Obama administration makes the misleading claim that families “could save up to $2,300” on health care costs per year in the future by buying insurance through exchanges called for by the law.
Obama ‘Road’ Film Takes Some Detours
An Obama campaign film, narrated by actor Tom Hanks, casts the president, not surprisingly, in the best light. But the 17-minute video lacks context and take liberties with some facts on health care and the auto bailout: The film says …
Health Care Costs Didn’t Double
Several readers asked us about Republican comments and news reports saying that a new Congressional Budget Office report had found that the federal health care law would cost double the original estimate. But that’s not what CBO’s report said. Instead, the report shows that the gross yearly costs of the new health care law are likely to be 8.6 percent higher than originally estimated.
Let’s start with the truth. In a March 13 report, the CBO gave updated estimates for the cost of insurance coverage provisions of the law for the 2012-2021 period.
Santorum’s Science
Rick Santorum calls global warming a “hoax.” If he were a scientist, he would be in a small minority.
“The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is,” Santorum said at the Gulf Coast Energy Summit in Biloxi, Miss., on March 12. He made similar comments in early February in Colorado Springs, Colo., saying that global warming was a “hoax” and that “man-made global warming” and proposed remedies were “bogus.”