Q: Does the health care law contain a “hidden” tax on hunting and fishing equipment?
A: No. There is a 2.3 percent excise tax on certain medical devices. Cabela’s, a Nebraska sporting goods company, applied the tax to some of its customers’ purchases by mistake.
Q: Will there be forced home inspections under the Affordable Care Act?
A: No. The law provides grants for state home-visiting programs for expectant and new parents. The programs are voluntary and participants can opt out any time.
House Speaker John Boehner, among other Republicans, wrongly tweeted that a recent “study” found “74% of small businesses will fire workers, cut hours under #Obamacare.” Actually, no more than 13 percent of the small businesses surveyed said that.
On Connecticut Public Broadcasting, Managing Editor Lori Robertson explains who would be exempt from the requirement to have health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The so-called individual mandate kicks in next year, with monetary penalties for those who don’t comply. But some will be exempt from the mandate.
For more on this topic, see our June 28, 2012, Ask FactCheck, “How Much Is the Obamacare ‘Tax’?“
President Barack Obama presented a glowing but incomplete view of how much Americans can save on premiums thanks to the Affordable Care Act.
Sen. Roy Blunt falsely claimed the Obama administration had “waived the income verification requirement” of the federal health care law.
Conservative critics of the Affordable Care Act are misrepresenting a study examining the health benefits of expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income people.
A new analysis on the Affordable Care Act prompts Republicans and the White House to trade misleading claims about the law’s impact on insurance premiums. Predictably, one side says they’ll go up; the other says they’ll go down. But both are stretching the facts, just as they’ve been doing since 2010, before the law was even enacted.
The release of the House GOP budget by Rep. Paul Ryan has sparked a resurgence of false and misleading claims about the Affordable Care Act, which the budget seeks to largely repeal. On the Sunday talk shows, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic National Committee, and Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, each distorted the facts regarding revenues raised in the health care law. And Ryan wrongly said the law would take money away from Medicare and ration benefits for seniors.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul made misleading or exaggerated claims in their responses to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. Rubio claimed that the federal health care law was causing people to lose “the health insurance they were happy with,” but that glosses over the fact that 27 million uninsured Americans are expected to gain coverage. Paul claimed the federal government borrows “$50,000 every second,” but the true figure is about $30,000.