The AFL-CIO is running a print ad this week arguing that "the House bill gets it right" on health care. The Senate bill? Not so much, says the labor federation.
Its beef is with the tax in the Senate Finance Committee bill on high-cost (a.k.a. "Cadillac") health care plans. Unions have come out against the tax, saying many of their middle-class members would be affected. The proposal calls for a 40 percent tax on the value of insurance benefits that exceed $21,000 a year for a family or $8,000 for an individual.
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’
Fun with Semantics
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele takes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to task in an RNC fundraising e-mail for claiming that a tax increase isn’t a tax increase. But Steele adds some spin of his own, falsely charging that the tax in question falls on "middle class families and small businesses."
The RNC mailer accuses Pelosi of using "political doublespeak to mislead the American people" and links to a clip of a CNBC interview in which the speaker is asked whether allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire isn’t a "tax increase."
Creepy Cap-and-Trade Claims are Illusions
It’s that spooky time of year, and legislation pending in Congress to curb carbon emissions is really giving the American Energy Alliance the willies.
What’s haunting us is the group’s misuse of statistics in a new ad attacking Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina for his support of the cap-and-trade approach that’s central to the major House and Senate bills.
According to the narrator: "This frightening tax will further hurt our economy, costing millions of American jobs,
Corzine, Christie Spar Over Income Taxes
With their race coming down to the wire, the candidates in New Jersey’s gubernatorial contest are attacking each other as ferociously as ever.
A TV ad from Republican Chris Christie accuses Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine of not paying state income taxes last year. Corzine’s campaign says the claim is an "outright lie." We find it to be true in a literal sense, but its implications are false.
The Christie ad says: "Last year, millionaire Corzine paid nothing,
Heather Graham Teaches Us About Polls
The liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org Political Action has released another health care ad featuring a Hollywood celebrity. Last time it was Will Ferrell talking of pygmy horses and executive compensation. This time it’s actress Heather Graham dressing up as a track and field runner (labeled "public option") and challenging health insurance executives to a race.
As part of its argument, the ad says that "over 70 percent of Americans want the public option." We’ve previously caught both liberal and conservative groups misleading the public with polling numbers during this ongoing health care debate,
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.
Cadillac Plans and the Middle Class
The liberal group Health Care for America Now is airing an ad that argues against a tax on high-cost employer-provided health care plans, a revenue-raising aspect of the Senate Finance Committee bill. "Some senators say they want to tax so-called ‘Cadillac’ health care plans, but those proposals will also tax the benefits of millions of middle class workers," the narrator says as an on-screen graphic pops up, claiming "40% tax on health care benefits of middle-class workers."