Facebook Twitter Tumblr Close Skip to main content
A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Health Savings Still Optimistic

Back when he was courting voters, then-candidate Barack Obama boasted that his health care plan would save the typical family "up to $2,500" a year. And May 13, as President Obama, he repeated the claim, this time relying both on undefined "comprehensive reform" and a cost-control promise by the insurance and medical industries to garner such benefits:

Obama, May 13: On Monday I met with representatives of the insurance and the drug companies, doctors and hospitals,

Would Obama Have Soldiers Pay for Own War Injuries?

Q: Did Obama accuse veterans of “selfishness” and whining? Would he have forced them to “pay for their war injuries”?

A: This chain e-mail contains fabricated quotes and misrepresents a budget idea that the White House scrapped. The quotes were intended as satire.

The Real Scott’s Shady?

We had plenty to say recently about a misleading health care ad from a group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights. We criticized the ad on its merits — but another organization has taken a different tack.

Health Care for America Now released this TV spot, titled "Shady," on May 7, attacking the character of the chairman of CPR, Rick Scott. The ad says that Scott’s former company (that’s Columbia/Hospital Corporation of America) "pleaded guilty to 14 felonies" in a Medicare fraud case that involved "overbilling"

Government-Run Health Care?

A group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights began airing a television ad this week that criticizes government-run health care and falsely suggests Congress wants a British-style system here in the U.S. The ad neglects to mention that President Obama hasn’t proposed a government-run plan and, in fact …

Swine Flu Fact and Fiction

You can’t spell "pandemic" without "panic," and news about swine flu has put people in a tizzy. As with any tizzy, this has resulted in some misinformation getting mixed in with the real-time updates. We present a few misconceptions about swine flu that we’ve seen or heard in the last few days.
1. You can get swine flu from eating pork.
No more than you can get avian flu from eating birds, human flu from eating humans,

How Serious Is Swine Flu?

Blogs, news organizations and Twitter are all exploding with rumor and fact about the swine flu outbreak. But at the National Academy of Sciences today, President Obama said there was no need to panic:

Obama: We are closely monitoring the emerging cases of swine flu in the United States. And this is obviously a cause for concern and requires a heightened state of alert.  But it’s not a cause for alarm.

So what’s the real terror alert level on swine flu?

Congress and Progress

Americans United For Change, a liberal labor-funded group, has released a new ad accusing congressional Republicans of opposing "progress."

The ad accuses Republicans of voting against children’s health insurance, equal pay for women, economic recovery, middle-class tax cuts and a budget that would lead to "long-term prosperity." We’ve called this group out before for unfounded claims about the Republican agenda, but this ad sticks closer to the truth. Democrats did push through bills on expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program and guaranteeing equal pay for women,

Social Security for Immigrants and Refugees

Q: Do immigrants and refugees get more in benefits than a retired U.S. citizen gets in Social Security?
A: This is nonsense. The claims propagated by a viral e-mail are not even close to the truth.

Bad Bankruptcy Stat, Repeated

Last week on our main site, we pointed out that President Obama used an incorrect statistic on bankruptcies caused by medical expenses in his address to Congress. And yesterday, he repeated it,
as Jake Tapper at ABC News noted
:

Tapper: "The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds," President Obama said at the opening of his White House forum on health care reform just now.

As we said then (and Tapper kindly links to us in his report): Last year,

Fact Checking Obama’s Speech

President Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress was stuffed with signals about the new direction his budget will take and meant-to-be reassuring words about the economy. But it was also peppered with exaggerations and factual misstatements. He said “we import more oil today than ever …