Q: Could somebody be imprisoned for not purchasing health insurance under the House health care bill?
A: Both House and Senate bills would levy a tax on persons who refuse to obtain coverage. Willfully evading that tax could result in jail time under the bill passed by the House – but not the bill approved by the Senate Finance Committee.
Issues: health care
Health Care Overhaul and TRICARE
Q: Would health care overhaul efforts eliminate TRICARE health coverage for members of the military and military retirees?
A: No. This claim in a chain e-mail is false. Neither Congress nor President Obama has proposed legislation to that effect.
Using H1N1 to Sway Health Care Debate
The American Future Fund, a conservative advocacy group, has released a new ad that uses the H1N1 vaccine as the crux of its argument against health care overhaul legislation.
The ad asks: "If the government can’t run a flu program, can we trust it to run America’s entire health care system?" But the question assumes a false premise. The health care proposals that are nearing full chamber votes are not empowering the government to run an entire health care system,
The “Government-Run” Mantra
The claim that the House bill would amount to "government-run health care" suffered a blow last week, when the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the so-called "public plan" in the revised bill wouldn’t offer much in the way of competition to private insurers. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from repeating the claim.
For several months, we’ve been debunking assertions that Democratic health care bills call for a Canadian or British-type system in which everyone is insured,
Boehner Misrepresents FactCheck.org’s Findings
Last week House Republican Leader John Boehner’s office issued a "Leader Alert" titled "10 Facts Every American Should Know About Speaker Pelosi’s 1,990-Page Gov’t Takeover of Health Care."
It’s a partisan document containing misleading characterizations of the bill. But the bullet point that bothers us most is #2, which reads:
MASSIVE CUTS TO MEDICARE BENEFITS FOR SENIORS. Despite grave warnings from CBO, FactCheck.org, and the independent Lewin Group that cuts to Medicare of the magnitude included in Speaker Pelosi’s bill would have a negative impact on seniors’
37th in Health Performance?
The Wall Street Journal‘s "Numbers Guy," Carl Bialik, takes a deeper look at a well-worn statistic: that the U.S. ranks 37th in the world in health system performance. His conclusion:
WSJ’s Bialik, Oct. 21: Among all the numbers bandied about in the health-care debate, this ranking stands out as particularly misleading.
The No. 37 figure comes from a 2000 World Health Organization report that attempted to grade nations’ health care according to five factors and assign an overall ranking to each.
Inoculation Misinformation
Wild rumors are flying about the newly developed vaccine for pandemic influenza H1N1, also known as “swine flu.” We’ve seen e-mails stating that the vaccine is tainted with antifreeze or Agent Orange, causes Gulf War syndrome, or has killed U.S. Navy sailors. One says the vaccine is an “evil depopulation scheme.” …
AHIP on the Attack: 50 Percent of What?
Almost immediately after releasing an incomplete report on the supposed increase in premiums that the Senate’s health care overhaul bill would trigger, the health insurers’ trade group took to the airwaves with a TV ad claiming the bill would shortchange millions of seniors.
This ad, which is sponsored by America’s Health Insurance Plans, screams for context.
As we’ve written previously, it’s true that about 10 million seniors are on Medicare Advantage, as the ad says, which means they’ve chosen to get their benefits from a private insurer instead of through the fee-for-service route that 78 percent of Medicare recipients use.
The PricewaterhouseCoopers Premium Problem
It makes for a pretty easy day of fact-checking when the very authors of a less-than-thorough analysis of a bill come out and say, you know, that study wasn’t exactly thorough.
And we didn’t pay them to say that.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main insurance industry lobby, however, did pay PricewaterhouseCoopers to take a look at certain aspects of the Senate Finance Committee health care bill – certain aspects AHIP doesn’t really like. PwC concluded that the bill would increase health care premiums substantially more than they would rise otherwise.
Malpractice: Savings Reconsidered
In 2004 we accused President Bush of using “dubious statistics” to support his claim that limiting malpractice awards to injured patients could save the economy between $60 billion and $108 billion per year. Ever since, we’ve said most independent research indicated little if any savings from limiting malpractice liability, and just a few weeks ago …