Dreams and Lies – Laurel Music
Sell the Lie – The Damnwells
Good Lies – The Notwist
Factcheck has a post on the “Whoppers of 2009” which demonstrates pretty much everything I find annoying about the way ‘fact checking’ is thought of these days. They start with health care, noting “death panels,” “socialized medicine,” etc. All well and good.
Well, how about the lies of the left?
Obama falsely claimed that an insurance company was responsible for the death of an Illinois cancer patient whose coverage was canceled because he hadn’t reported gallstones … Obama got this whopper from an online magazine article; the author later admitted jumping to a wrong conclusion.
So, Obama told a “whopper”…based on an incorrect story in a magazine? Well, I guess he said it and it wasn’t true. A whopper though? And, of course, the problem of people being denied coverage because of things like this IS real even if the particular story was wrong.
How about their second leftist lie on health care? Obama exaggerated by at least a factor of two when he said that health care “causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds.” Once again, they are right to note that the facts were wrong here. Still, whether it’s 900,000 or ‘just’ 450,000 medical bankruptcies, surely you’d admit that it’s a pretty serious problem, right?
#3: We twice caught Obama saying that the “average American family is paying thousands” or “a thousand dollars” in health insurance premiums to pay for uncompensated care for the uninsured. But he used a figure from a group that lobbies for expanded coverage. Nonpartisan experts at the Kaiser Family Foundation put the figure much lower — about $200.”
Okay, this is just infuriating. I mean, yes I agree that groups who lobby for things find ways to exaggerate their claims. Now, all things equal I will tend to prefer a nonpartisan organization. Except that…WTF does that mean in this context? Sure, the KFF is good. But Families USA isn’t precisely partisan either.
I would be surprised if the $1000 figure is right. But, based on what I know of this, it does seem like to some extent there is grounds for legitimate disagreement here.
And once again, forest/trees. So let’s say it’s $200 rather than $1000 that’s passed on in insurance premiums. The KFF says a big chunk of the difference would then get made up by government payment. Well, okay. But where does the government get money? Yeah, exactly.
And, as with the other examples, even if the numbers are off, the general point is completely right that there is a ton of money getting burned here because people aren’t covered.
Final one: Obama repeated his claim that the average family could save $2,500 a year under health care overhaul legislation. We picked apart his optimistic calculations during the 2008 presidential campaign, but he repeated the claim as recently as May 17, saying that “comprehensive reform” and some other private sector measures could save “$2,500 per family every year.” Since then we haven’t heard much about this. His claim is not supported by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which estimated that under the Senate bill (as introduced), there wouldn’t be much of a reduction at all.
Where to start?
Well, for one thing, there’s the problem that Obama’s claim took place before health care was run through the Congressional grinder. So…who can say whether a theoretical health care bill might have saved $2500? Maybe it could. If we just grafted the system of any other industrial country in the world, we’d likely save significantly more than that.
But that’s not the bill we got. How exactly is a claim made by Obama six months ago supposed to anticipate Max Baucus and Grassley and Nelson and Lieberman and company getting their hands over everything?
And once again, we have the nonpartisan fetishism. The CBO is good, very good, and it’s important that they exist. But they’re not the end-all be-all of information here. They can make bad assumptions as much as anyone else. On the whole, I’d trust them over other folks, but they aren’t exactly Moses with tablets in his hand.
So we’ve got a mistake in a magazine article which the president referenced, modest overstatements of real problems, and an exaggeration of cost savings which has not been repeated since it became clear that ‘comprehensive’ reform was totally off the table. Compare that to ‘death panels’ and ‘socialized medicine’ and the like…
Anyways, the point of all this is NOT that the left should be allowed to get away with massaging the data, just because the lunatic fringe on the right is saying more outrageous things. People should be help accountable, and as I’ve said in the past the left is in trouble if it starts pretending like honesty and adherence to reality is not important to us.
All that said, there’s a difference between identifying those things as they happen and putting together a “whoppers of the year” article that insists on including the same number of lies from each side. Because, of course, we wouldn’t want to take sides on the issue. The frustrating thing about this sort of article is the way that it allows the organization to wash its hands of how things are perceived. The only concern is for the minutia, but no attention is paid to the impression that it actually produces in people.
And the message that this sort of thing sends is: well, everyone lies. Both sides are wrong. Meh.
There are, literally, millions of lies told a year in politics. And there are even more half-truths, intentionally confusing phrasings, attempts at misdirection, etc. Factcheck can pretend that they’re a totally independent organization simply reporting ‘the facts’ – but if they’re not willing to step in and make some editorial judgments about message, rather than just content, I’m not sure that they’re really offering anything that useful.