With the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act on June 28, voters are guaranteed to continue hearing the same old false claims about the law from politicians. And President Barack Obama and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney wasted little time …
Q: How much will the “tax” penalty be for going without health insurance?
A: The minimum assessment will be $695 per person (but no more than $2,085 per family) in 2016, when fully phased in. The amount can be higher depending on income. But there are exemptions for low-income persons and others.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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,
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,