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Heritage Network
Reporters
Should Get Their “PolitiFacts” Straight on
Obamacare
by Mike Gonzalez
August 26, 2013
Does calling a
reporter a “fact checker” make him or her
more even-handed? Hardly.
PolitiFact is a
case in point. It is a website of the Tampa
Bay Times, manned by journalists and editors. It purports to rule from
on high
on the veracity of political statements, assigning “Truth-O-Meter”
ratings that
range from True to “Pants on Fire.” It is all very droll, or painfully
sophomoric, depending on where you stand politically. Studies by George
Mason
University and the University of Minnesota have concluded that
PolitiFact is a
biased outfit that is much harsher on conservatives than on liberals.
Last week,
PolitiFact decided to rate statements on
defunding Obamacare made by Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint at
town
hall meetings across the country. Well, these are not ratings made last
week—PolitiFact just wrote on how it had rated these statements in the
past. A
bit of a summer rerun.
I checked with one
of our top health care experts, Chris
Jacobs, and this is what he told me on PolitiFact’s “ratings”: “The
claims
about ‘debunked’ statements being made on the Defund Obamacare Town
Hall tour
ignore the actual facts behind those statements.” Chris makes the
following
points:
PolitiFact’s
objections to the characterization of Obamacare
as government-centered medicine ignore conclusions from the
non-partisan
Congressional Budget Office that a mandate for all Americans to
purchase health
insurance, like that in Obamacare, is “an unprecedented form of federal
action,” or analysis from the non-partisan Congressional Research
Service that
“the precise number of new entities that will ultimately be created” by
Obamacare
is “currently unknowable.”
PolitiFact’s
objections to the characterization of Obamacare
putting bureaucrats before doctors and patients ignore Obamacare’s
expansion of
pay-for-performance programs—which will reduce Medicare payments to
doctors who
do not follow guidelines defined by federal bureaucrats—as well as the
board of
15 unelected officials created by Obamacare who will make rulings
reducing
Medicare spending.
PolitiFact’s
objections to talk that Obamacare relies on
reduced Medicare spending to fund its coverage expansions ignore
comments from
Nancy Pelosi—that firebrand conservative—who admitted that Democrats
“took half
a trillion dollars out of Medicare in [Obamacare], the health care
bill,
already…
Read the rest of
the article at Heritage Network
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