Former President Barack Obama claimed that Republicans’ “sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than 3 million Americans their health insurance.” That’s according to one estimate, but another found no significant change in the rate or the number of uninsured from 2016 to 2017.
Statistical measures of how things have changed since the president took office.
So, was the Congressional Budget Office really “way, way off … in every aspect” of how it predicted that Obamacare would work, as the White House claims? No, it wasn’t.
President Donald Trump made a triumphant return to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, where he made a lot of the same false and misleading claims we’ve been fact-checking for months.
President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that “nobody ever deducts all the people that have already lost their health insurance” from estimates on how many have gained insurance under the Affordable Care Act, or stand to lose it if the law is repealed.
These are some of the numbers by which the future successes or failures of the new presidency will be measured.
Top Democrats, including President Obama, have credited the Affordable Care Act for more than 9 million Americans obtaining health insurance. But that’s an exaggerated figure that includes individuals who renewed Medicaid coverage and others who switched insurance to plans on the exchanges.
Republican Newt Gingrich mistakenly claimed on "Meet the Press" that a U.S. helicopter involved in the Osama bin Laden raid "was shot down." There’s no evidence of that. U.S. officials say it crash landed and was destroyed by Navy SEALs. Gingrich also was wrong to say Pakistan’s intelligence chief did not apologize for "failing to find" bin Laden. He may not have apologized to Gingrich or the U.S. public, but he did apologize to the Pakistani Parliament.
One of the items we noted in our Sept. 10 wrap-up of President Barack Obama’s televised prime-time address to Congress was his carefully worded estimate of the number of uninsured citizens.
Obama, Sept. 9: There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.
We said that Obama appeared to be underestimating the number of uninsured, even if we subtract the estimated 10 million uninsured who are not U.S. citizens. With the Census Bureau now reporting 46.3 million people without insurance,
Q: How many of the uninsured are U.S. citizens?
A: The vast majority of the uninsured are citizens from working families.