Q: What is the percentage of total personal bankruptcies caused by health care bills?
A: A Harvard study published in 2005 found that about half of those who filed for bankruptcy said health care expenses, illness or related job-loss led them to do so. Twenty-seven percent cited uncovered medical bills specifically, and 2 percent said they had mortgaged their home to pay what they owed.
We Wondered Where They Went…
Someone whose work we criticized a fair bit in 2004 and 2006 explains why, perhaps, so little was heard from MoveOn.org and other groups in 2008 in this piece fromNational Public Radio. Money was scarce, but other factors — such as the presence of factcheckers — may have had an impact.
Cost of Obama’s Transition
Q: How is President-elect Obama paying for his transition?
A: Obama’s transition is being financed with $5.3 million in public funds provided by Congress, supplemented by another $6.7 million that his team hopes to raise from individuals in donations not exceeding $5,000 each.
Our Disinformed Electorate
We saw more aggressive fact-checking by journalists in this election than ever before. Unfortunately, as a post-election Annenberg Public Policy Center poll confirms, millions of voters were bamboozled anyway.
More than half of U.S. adults (52 percent) said the claim that Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes on most small businesses is truthful, when in fact only a small percentage would see any increase.
More than two in five (42.3 percent) found truth in the claim that Sen.
Auto Worker Salaries
Q: Do auto workers really make more than $70 per hour?
A: No. That figure is derived from what the auto companies pay in wages, health, retirement and other benefits, and includes the cost of providing benefits to retirees.
You Ask, We Answer
That’s the idea behind our Ask FactCheck feature on themain site.
This week, we looked into a suspicious quote allegedly from President-elect Barack Obama, speaking about urgent gun policy changes. The reader who sent it to us wasn’t convinced it was legitimate, and our reporting showed it was almost certainly a fabrication. The quote claims Obama told a "VPC Fund Raiser" in 2007 that "[i]n the first year, I intend to work with Congress on a national no carry law,
Obama’s Gun Ban?
Q: Did Obama promise last year to ban all semi-automatic guns during his first year as president?
A: A widely circulated e-mail quoting Obama is baseless and almost certainly fabricated. He does support reinstatement of the expired "assault weapons ban" but isn’t calling for a wider ban on all semi-automatic weapons. He said repeatedly during the campaign, "I am not going to take your guns away."
Long Term Debt Forecasts
Q: What’s a good source for the U.S.A.’s long-term debt, annual revenues and expeditures, and long-term deficit forecasts?
A: The Congressional Budget Office publishes data on the federal government’s budget – that’s revenues and expenditures, deficits and debt. The Treasury Dept. is the best source for daily debt figures.
Georgia Ad Attacks
In recent weeks, we’ve posted two articles on our main site on the misleading ad war being waged on Georgia airwaves. The Senate run-off election is set for tomorrow (Dec. 2) to determine whether Republican Saxby Chambliss holds onto his seat or challenger Jim Martin, a former state representative, adds to the Democratic majority.
Before the votes are tallied, we wanted to give Georgians the low-down on one last suspicious claim we hadn’t addressed. A Chambliss ad says that Martin "tried to raise property taxes 150 percent"
The Case of the Sleeping Justice
Another election, another set of bare-fisted battles for state Supreme Court seats. Think the presidential campaign ads were uncivil and misleading? Well…they were. But so were those put on the air by judicial candidates and their backers, who no longer blink at spending in the millions of dollars. Final tallies aren’t in yet, but in the last week before Nov. 4, $5 million was spent on ads in these races, more than in 2006, according to figures compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice.