We’ve burned through rather a lot of pixels combating the claims of those who deny that Barack Obama is eligible to be president of the United States. He is, by virtue of having been born in Hawaii, as attested to repeatedly by state officials and even by the flagship of conservative publications, the National Review. And, for the 10 percent of you out there who aren’t entirely sure, yes, Hawaii is part of the United States.
Hitting Grassley With Inflated Numbers
Two liberal groups, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America are airing an ad that faults Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley for not supporting a "public option" as part of any proposed health care legislation. But their ad uses inflated figures.
Grassley has spoken out against including a "public option" as part of a health care bill. The ad implies that he’s done so because he’s "taken over $2 million dollars from the big health and insurance industries that oppose reform."
Health Care and the “One Way Hash”
Here at FactCheck.org, we like to complicate things.
The statement isn’t meant to be (entirely) a flippant one. It really is true that a lot of what we do here is to take what appear to be pretty simple claims and show that the reality is far more complicated than it might appear at first glance. Quite often we find ourselves saying things like, "That’s true, but it’s misleading…"
Julian Sanchez, now a research fellow at the Cato Institute,
RNC’s Steele to Seniors: “Stand With Us”
The Republican National Committee says it will be running this new TV ad in Florida and on selected cable networks starting Sept. 1. It features GOP Chairman Michael Steele touting the party’s "Seniors’ Bill of Rights," which we said last week is a mixture of false, true and misleading claims.
Steele – continuing in the same vein – is shown urging President Obama to "change his mind" about making "cuts to Medicare," "ration[ing] health care based on age"
Cancer Rates and Unjustified Conclusions
A number of opponents of new health care legislation, most recently our old friend Betsy McCaughey on "The Daily Show," have claimed that cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. than in countries with nationalized health care. They conclude from this that the state of general health and health care quality in the U.S. must therefore be higher. Does the U.S. really have a higher cancer survival rate? And what does that mean about our health care system?
TGIF
August traditionally may be a slow news month in the nation’s capital, but the bogus claims have continued to fly in the final full week of meteorological summer. This week, we’ve written about health care, health care and, oh yeah, more health care.
An article from Aug. 21 addresses abortion funding in H.R. 3200, the House version of the health care overhaul backed by the White House. We found that President Obama is stretching when he claims that the bill won’t provide any abortion funding.
Republican Infighting on Health Insurance
Never shy about training its sights on fellow Republicans, the Club for Growth is going after Utah GOP Sen. Robert Bennett with a new television ad and letter-writing campaign targeting his support for a Senate health care bill.
It’s not a Senate bill that has cleared any committee, such as the one passed in July by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee; the HELP bill is the one that, at least for now, is generally referred to as "the Senate bill"
‘SpotCheck.org’? We Disagree.
In an Aug. 20 appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” former New York Lt. Gov. (and health care legislation critic) Betsy McCaughey referred to our organization as “spot-check dot org,” claiming we failed to adequately read the House health care bill. McCaughey is the source of the false claim that the bill calls for mandatory counseling for seniors “to do what’s in society’s best interest … and cut your life short.”
As we said in our article “False Euthanasia Claims,”
Palin vs. Obama: Death Panels
Like many disagreements in the digital age, it all started with a post on Facebook. Last Friday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin posted a note to her Facebook page and introduced a new term to the health care debate:
Palin, Aug. 7: The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide,
When Philosophy Meets Politics
We’ll wager that, unless you happen to be a practicing bioethicist, you’d never heard of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel six weeks ago. But now Emanuel, the director of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, finds himself labeled a "deadly doctor" by Betsy McCaughey in an opinion piece in the New York Post. And controversial conservative pundit Ann Coulter recently proclaimed that "Zeke Emanuel is on my death list."
We debunked McCaughey’s charges in an Ask FactCheck item we posted today.