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“Gifts of bogus
statistics for the health-care law’s birthday” No, that’s not my description of the load of malarkey Democrats paraded last week in celebration of the one-year anniversary of the passage of ObamaCare. It’s the headline to a column today that ran in the Washington Post’s “The Fact Checker—The Truth Behind the Rhetoric” column written by Glenn Kessler.
What’s interesting is that in the Democratic-leaning Post, Kessler would begin by offering near-kudos to the floor speech made last week by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) talking about the same milestone: “[W]e found that generally McConnell did not exaggerate or use bogus figures,” even adding a second compliment for the way McConnell handled the Congressional Budget Office analysis of a potential reduction in employment. Not so for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.). “By contrast” Kessler wrote, “House Democrats appear to show little hesitation about repeating claims that previously have found to be false or exaggerated.” Just to take two examples: Pelosi said "It's about jobs. Does it create jobs? Health insurance reform creates 4 million jobs, and in the last 12 months the private sector has added 1.5 million new jobs, and of that a quarter of a million were in the health insurance industry.” Well, yes. The 4 million is correct--if you extrapolate the projections of a liberal advocacy group and then multiple the upper range figure by TEN! Pelosi, Part Two: “It's about reducing the deficit. Again, it reduces the deficit more than $1 trillion over the life of the bill.” To save time, let’s just take Kessler’s summary introduction: “This is another bogus statistic for which we have previously awarded three Pinocchios.” The rest of the explanation includes such comments as “particularly absurd,” “tentative guess,” and “fairly meaningless.” Take five minutes of your time and read www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/gifts-of-bogus-statistics-for-the-health-care-laws-birthday/2011/03/18/ABzG99s_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics. I need your feedback on both Today's News & Views and National Right to Life News Today. Please send your comments todaveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha |
