Both Republicans and the Obama administration have pushed misleading claims on what impact the federal health care law has on insurance premiums.
For more on this issue, see “Misleading on Premiums” from March 26.
Issues: Affordable Care Act
‘Life of Julia’ Not So Realistic
The Obama campaign’s fictitious portrayal of a woman’s life under the president’s policies versus those of Mitt Romney exaggerates the impact of the federal health care law.
Read about other claims in the “Julia” slide show in our May 8 article, “ ‘The Life of Julia,’ Corrected.”
Kids and Preexisting Conditions
An Obama campaign video wrongly implies that 17 million kids with preexisting conditions were being denied health insurance before the federal law was passed.
Read more about the Obama administration’s claim in our March 21 article, “Obama ‘Road’ Film Takes Some Detours.”
Small Businesses and the Health Care Law
Is the Affordable Care Act “devastating to small businesses,” as some critics claim? We find such assertions are overblown. The law is actually beneficial to truly small companies.
See “GOP’s ‘Job-Killing’ Whopper, Again” (Feb. 21) for more on claims about the impact on small businesses.
‘Obama’s Promise,’ Part II
And now, the rest of the story on that misleading “Obama’s Promise” ad from Crossroads GPS.
Besides the almost totally false claim that we covered earlier, the ad also:
Claims the president broke a promise to help homeowners facing foreclosure, when in fact 5.9 million have received assistance.
Gives a somewhat darker picture of the mortgage foreclosure situation than the facts warrant.
Exaggerates the number of persons likely to lose employer-sponsored health coverage under the new health care law.
Chamber Continues to Mislead on Health Care Law
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s latest onslaught of television ads continues to miseducate voters about the potential impact of the health care law.
Obama Eats His Words
President Obama is being forced to modify his absurdly wrong claim that it would be “unprecedented” for the Supreme Court to strike down the new health care law.
He made that statement April 2 in a news conference:
Obama, April 2: Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.
As any number of others were quick to point out,
How Many Would Repeal ‘Obamacare’?
Mitt Romney says “most Americans want to get rid of” President Obama’s two-year-old health care law. Is he right? That depends on which poll-taker is asking the question, and how it’s worded.
Romney made the assertion at a rally in Louisiana on March 23, marking the second anniversary of the president signing the law. He’s not alone — we’ve heard others make the same statement. But some polls show otherwise.
For example, a Bloomberg News national poll of 1,002 adults taken March 8 through March 11 asked the question this way: “Turning to the health care law passed last year,
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.
GOP’s ‘Job-Killing’ Whopper, Again
The exaggerated Republican claim that the new health care law “kills jobs” was high on our list of the “Whoppers of 2011.” But the facts haven’t stopped Republicans and their allies from making the “job-killing” claim a major theme of their campaign 2012 TV ads: Five ads by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce …