Q: Will the Affordable Care Act force fire departments to provide health insurance to their volunteers?
A: No. A memo issued by the Department of Treasury makes clear volunteer firefighters will not be counted as full-time employees under the Affordable Care Act.
Democrats are telling the constituents of a Pennsylvania Republican that repealing the Affordable Care Act “would take health care away from 657,000 children in Pennsylvania with preexisting conditions.” No, it wouldn’t.
Republican Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas says he’s running against Sen. John Cornyn in the state’s 2014 primary because the incumbent is a backstabbing “liberal” who only votes with Republicans “temporarily” when an election approaches. But Cornyn’s voting record shows otherwise.
Sen. Rand Paul says “black unemployment in America is double white unemployment” and “hasn’t budged” under President Obama. Actually, the black unemployment rate is lower now than when Obama took office, and the gap between the races is below the historical average.
Q: Does a college classmate of Michelle Obama work for CGI Federal? Did that company receive a no-bid contract to build the HealthCare.gov website?
A: Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president at CGI, and Obama graduated from Princeton University in 1985. However, company and government officials say the contract was awarded through a competitive bidding process.
President Obama says public investment in schools was “allowed to wither” as a result of the “trickle-down ideology” of recent decades. There’s no clear trend for public spending on education as a percentage of the U.S. economy, but public investment hasn’t withered.
House Speaker John Boehner says his premiums will double, and his deductible will triple, under the Affordable Care Act. That’s true, but it is misleading to compare Boehner with the “many Americans seeing their costs go up,” as his spokesman Brendan Buck has put it.
Rick Santorum wrongly claimed health plans on the federal health care exchange are offering more limited networks of doctors and hospitals “because the Obama bill set prices at such levels” that some doctors and hospitals “do not participate in these programs.”