There’s plenty of fodder for fact-checkers in Sen. Ted Cruz’s looong attack on Obamacare, and in President Obama’s defense of it.
FactChecking ‘Pernicious’ Obamacare Claims
Issues: Affordable Care Act
Cabela’s Medical Tax Mistake
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.
Inspection Deception
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.
GOP Mistweets #Obamacare Survey Results
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.
Who’s Exempt?
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’?“
Obama Overhypes Health Savings
President Barack Obama presented a glowing but incomplete view of how much Americans can save on premiums thanks to the Affordable Care Act.
Blunt Wrong on Income Verification
Sen. Roy Blunt falsely claimed the Obama administration had “waived the income verification requirement” of the federal health care law.
Distortions in the Medicaid Battle
Conservative critics of the Affordable Care Act are misrepresenting a study examining the health benefits of expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income people.
Health Insurance Premium Spin
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.
GOP Budget Revives ‘Obamacare’ Claims
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.