Why Is Telling the Truth so Hard for This White House?

Here is the latest Barrack Obama statement fact checked by the Washington Post:

“We believe we’re a better country than a country where we allow, every day, 14,000 Americans to lose their health coverage; or where every year, tens of thousands of Americans died because they didn’t have health care; or where out-of-pocket costs drove millions of citizens into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth.”

The Post gives the president a pass on the first claim, citing previous fact checking, but awards 1½ Pinocchios for the next two.

Even the first claim is false, however. The 14,000 figure was an estimate of the number losing health insurance because they lost a job and it was made during the recession, when there was rising unemployment. But the president, remember, has pledged to reverse the jobs picture. If he is successful, we should have 14,000 a day gaining insurance ― unless of course the private insurance industry is in turmoil because of ObamaCare.

Claim number two, the Post reports is cherry picking the data. And claim number three is refuted by a study by an economist who is actually working for the Obama administration! The original claim that lack of insurance kills was based on a thoroughly discredited study by the Institute of Medicine. Richard Kronick, now working for HHS, concluded that if the study were done correctly,

the IOM study “would almost certainly have found no difference in survival between the uninsured and similar insured respondents.” As part of his study, Kronick took a sample of more than 600,000 people, interviewed from 1986 to 2002, with follow-ups, and then controlled for a variety of factors, including how long they went without insurance. He consistently found no difference in the [mortality] outcome.

More recent research has produced mixed results, but see this study by former Congressional Budget Office director, June O’Neill.

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