In this week’s video, CNN’s Jake Tapper reviews President Donald Trump’s suggestion that fact-checkers didn’t hold then-President Barack Obama accountable for his false promise that if you like your health care plan or your doctor, you can keep them under the Affordable Care Act. We did.
At his Feb. 11 rally in El Paso, Trump said, “You can keep your doctor, remember that, 28 times. That didn’t happen; turned out to be a lie. Hey, where are the fact-checkers? You know some of the most dishonest people in media are the so-called fact-checkers.”
We wrote as far back as August 2009 — before the ACA became law — that Obama couldn’t make that promise to everyone in a story, headlined “Keep Your Own Insurance? Not Everyone.”
Two months earlier at a White House press conference, Tapper — then at ABC News — asked Obama about his claim, saying that employers might be attracted to a cheaper federal plan. Obama said: “When I say if you have your plan and you like it, or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don’t have to change plans, what I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform.”
But Obama repeated his talking point over the years, and we repeatedly wrote about it. His claim made our list of health care whoppers in 2010, the “Whoppers of 2012, Early Edition” and a round-up of “Obamacare Myths” in September 2013.
For more, see our story, “Trump is Wrong About Fact-Checkers.”
This video is part of our collaboration with CNN’s “State of the Union with Jake Tapper.” Past videos can be found on FactCheck.org.