(Susan Walsh/AP)
“If you look at the economic data, the suggestion that the [Affordable Care Act] is reducing full-time employment is belied by the facts….The data reflects that there is not support for the proposition that businesses are not hiring full-time employees because of the Affordable Care Act.”
--White House Press Secretary Jay Carney,
news briefing
, July 16, 2013
Some readers questioned this assertion, having read articles such as one that appeared in The Wall Street Journal last week, titled “
Restaurant Shift: Sorry, Just Part-time
.” In fact, Carney’s statement was in direct response to a question about the article.
Forgive us for being press critics, but the story actually did not live up to the headline. It was largely anecdotal in nature, with numerous caveats and at times speculation. We encountered the same issue when we
examined the case of the City of Long Beach
amid reports that it was shifting 1,600 workers to part-time because of the health care law. The initial reports were overstated.
That’s part of the problem at this point. Critics may
seize on a month’s data
here or an anecdote there, but the full impact of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, on employment will not be felt until after it is fully implemented. (The employer mandate supposedly pushing companies to hire part-time workers, in fact, has been delayed until 2015.)
Continue Reading »
((Susan Walsh/Associated Press))
“Because of this new rule, because of the fact that it improves the value of the coverage that you purchase, last year alone, Americans saved $3.4 billion in lower premiums. That's $3.4 billion on top of these rebates.”
— President Obama,
remarks on the Affordable Care Act
, July 18, 2013
With the House of Representatives yet again voting to scale back President Obama’s signature health-care law, the president made a case for the law in an East Room ceremony.
The rebates the president refers to stem from the “80/20 rule” or “Medical Loss Ratio rule” in the law, in which insurance companies must rebate a portion of the premiums if they spent less than 80 percent of the premium on medical care and efforts to improve care. In 2012, insurance companies shipped about $500 million in rebates to American families,
according to the Department of Health and Human Services
.
That’s real money, about $100 per family.
But what’s the $3.4 billion the president mentioned? That seemed a bit fishy, so we decided to explore further.
The Facts
Under the rule, insurance companies cannot keep more than 20 percent of the premiums for overhead and profits. (The rule is even stricter for the larger group market — 15 percent.) So there obviously would be an incentive for insurance companies to get their overhead down so they would not have to mail rebates to consumers.
Continue Reading »
“In his book, Cuccinelli questions whether Medicare and Social Security should exist.”
— Peggy Borgard, retired Virginia resident in an new television ad sponsored by the Democratic Party of Virginia
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R), who is running for governor, has offered Democrats a gold mine of targets with his book, “
The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty.
” As our colleague Laura Vozzella
put it
: “Spoiler alert: The pages reveal Cuccinelli is a conservative.”
This television ad portrays Borgard as a Henrico County resident who worked for 60 years. (She
recently retired
as director of operations for a youth soccer league and contributed $700 to Democratic candidates in 2012 and $295 to the Henrico County Democratic Committee in 2011 and 2012, according to
campaign
finance
records.) She offers especially sharp criticism based on material from the book:
“I’m retired and I do rely on Social Security and Medicare. I think Ken Cuccinelli does not care about people like me. In his book, Cuccinelli questions whether Medicare and Social Security should exist, and said people are dependent on government. It scares me to think of Ken Cuccinelli as governor. I think he is way out of touch with everybody.”
Is this what Cuccinelli says in the book?
The Facts
The ad directs readers to pages 62 and 63 of the book. This chapter mostly deals with Cuccinelli’s outrage at the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which he views as an example of lawmakers in both parties creating new programs that he claims make people dependent on government largess. Here is the relevant section:
Continue Reading »
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) speaks to reporters on July 9 as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) listens.
(Drew Angerer/GETTY IMAGES)
“The Democrats, when they passed the health care law, took $50 billion from over-charging students and used it to reduce the debt, pay for Pell grants, and to pay for the health-care bill. And they’re still doing that.”
--Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), remarks to reporters, July 9, 2013
Note: The Pinocchio rating on this column has been changed since the column was first posted
We
delved last week
into the arcane accounting rules concerning federal student loans –in which tens of billions of dollars in “profits” can be turned into deficits depending on the method you use. Now let’s look at another claim regarding these loans—that students are being overcharged to pay for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
The Facts
When the health-care law was passed in 2010, Democrats slipped in massive changes to student-loan programs, essentially cutting banks out of the business. In the
official score of the health-care bill
by the Congressional Budget Office, ending federal guarantees for federal loans and replacing them with direct loans made by the Education Department would yield $58 billion between 2010 and 2019.
Continue Reading »
(Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
“Obamacare, whatever comes up, Republicans throw that in. You realized they’ve voted to repeal it 40 times? What’s happened 40 times, of course, it’s failed.”
— Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), interview on “Meet the Press,” July 14, 2013
We don’t mean to pick on Reid, who also was
subject of a fact check
on Monday, but a reader complained that this oft-told factoid by Democrats is inaccurate on two counts: one, not every vote concerned the whole law and two, some of those votes turned out to be successful.
So we decided to investigate.
The Facts
Congressional Republicans have never reconciled themselves to passage of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which became law in 2010 without a single Republican vote when the Democrats had big majorities in the House and Senate. But a review of the votes commonly lumped together as “repeal” shows that only a handful in this list of “40” (actually 37) involved repeal of the entire law.
Continue Reading »
(KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS)
“Is there anyone out there in the world, real world, that believes that what`s going on in the Congress of the United States is good? Our approval rating is lower than North Korea`s.”
--Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” July 14, 2013
This line by Harry Reid is a good one, earning him
headlines
as he made the case for rules reform in the Senate, but it almost seemed too good to be true. Is Congress really held in lower esteem than the xenophobic communist government in Pyongyang?
The Facts
Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson pointed us to two different Gallup polls. One,
from June
, found that “confidence” in Congress was at 10 percent. The second,
from March
, found that the “favorability” for North Korea was at 12 percent.
Continue Reading »
(J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
“The point is, is that the mandate was not delayed. Certain reporting by businesses that could be perceived as onerous, that reporting requirement was delayed, and partially to review how it would work and how it could be better. It was not a delay of the mandate for the businesses, and there shouldn’t be a delay of the mandate for individuals.”
— House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), news conference, July 11, 2013
After all of the headlines in the past week, we were surprised to see Pelosi’s assertion that the “mandate was not delayed.” Indeed, just minutes before Pelosi made these comments, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), held his own news conference to complain that other elements of the law have not also been delayed.
“The president has delayed Obamacare’s employer mandate, but hasn’t delayed the mandate on individuals or families,” Boehner said. “I think it's unfair and indefensible. If you’re a software company making billions of dollars in profits, you’re exempt from Obamacare next year. But if you’re a 28-year-old struggling to pay off your student loans, you’re not.”
That’s such a dramatically different take that one can see why most Americans hate politics. So what’s going on here?
The Facts
The Obama administration announced the change last week in an unusual way — with
a blog post
on the Treasury Department Web site with a title designed to not give away the news: “Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner.”
Continue Reading »
(Patrick Whittemore/AP)
“While students are paying more, the federal government is boosting its own profits — $51 billion from our student loan programs in 2013 alone.”
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.),
floor speech
, July 8, 2013
Who knew? The federal government knows how to make a profit! Or, as Warren twice said in arguing for a cut in interest rates on student loans: “obscene profits.” Warren’s eye-popping figure suggests that the federal government is in the realm of Apple Inc. (
net income of $42 billion in 2012
) and Exxon Mobil Corp. (
$45 billion in 2012
).
But there’s a reason why accountants will one day inherit the earth. The numbers look dramatically different — tens of billions of dollars different — depending on which arcane method of accounting you use.
The Facts
Lacey Rose, Warren’s press secretary, was quick to turn up a source for this figure: the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. She pointed us to a
CBO spreadsheet
showing that outlays in the student loan program will be a negative $51 billion (in other words, a gain for the government). This figure includes $15 billion from a re-estimate of the cost of the student loans disbursed in previous years.
Continue Reading »
(Gary Cameron/Reuters)
“In Egypt, democratic authoritarianism is replaced with military junta. American neocons say send them more of your money.”
— Tweet by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), July 8, 2013
Sen. Rand Paul has staked out a vaguely isolationist position in the Republican Party,
skeptical of foreign aid
and military intervention. Earlier this week, he reflected that stance with a pair of tweets.
We were struck by his use of the phrase of “American neocons,” meaning neoconservatives. This is a strain of foreign policy thinking generally associated with Republicans (or sometimes, in the distant past, Democrats such as the late senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson). But it is frequently misunderstood and misapplied.
Does Sen. Paul have it right? (His spokeswoman, Moira Bagley, did not respond to repeated queries asking for specific examples of “American neocons” calling for more aid.)
The Facts
First of all, a precise definition of “neoconservatism” is rather difficult to come by, and people often associated with the term tend to dislike it. (Some argue that it is actually negative code for “Jewish,” though not all supposed neoconservatives are Jewish.) But broadly, neoconservatives are perceived to want to influence the internal politics of countries toward a more democratic path, in contrast to the so-called “realists” who prefer to deal with states, which may be headed by authoritarians, as they are.
Continue Reading »
“If we can’t pick our own doctor, how do I know my family’s getting the care they need?”
— “Julie,” in a TV ad sponsored by Americans for Prosperity
What is it about children and health care?
The conservative advocacy group
Americans for Prosperity
is
launching a $700,000 ad buy
that features a mother expressing concern that her son won’t get the medical care he needs for seizures because of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.
Meanwhile, the pro-Obama group Organizing for Action also
released a TV ad
featuring medical care for a child, to highlight the law’s ban on lifetime limits on medical coverage.
As attack ads go, the AFP ad is fairly gentle, posing questions and directing viewers to a Web site,
ObamaCareRiskFactors.com
, intended to generate doubts about the law.
Let’s explore the basis for Julie’s question, which suggests that Americans will lose their preferred doctors because of the law. (She also asks another question, which we may explore in a future column.)
The Facts
Levi Russell, spokesman for AFP, pointed us to three statements, with news article citations as a basis for the question:
Continue Reading »