Fact Checking the Fact Checkers
The Washington Post this morning released a “Fact Checker” piece taking issue with claims regarding President Obama’s broken promise to cut premiums by $2,500. However, in reaching its conclusions, the article left out two significant facts.
First, even though Obamacare itself wasn’t enacted until March 2010, much of the Obama health agenda was enacted within weeks of the President taking office. The Obama campaign’s 2008 memo said that health IT was one of the ways the new Administration would make good on its premium savings promise. And health IT legislation passed more than a year before Obamacare – it was enacted in February 2009 as part of the “stimulus.” Also in February 2009, Obama signed the massive SCHIP insurance expansion into law. And here’s what he said at the time of the SCHIP bill signing, on February 4, 2009: “If Congress passes [the “stimulus], in just one month, we will have done more to modernize our health care system than we’ve done in the past decade.” So either the Administration achieved significant reforms on health care within weeks of taking office – in which case that legislation should have been cutting premiums by now, as the Obama campaign promised – or the President went around in early 2009 making false claims about the scope of his accomplishments. Which is it?
Second, the Fact Checker column says that Obama’s promise of a premium cut doesn’t apply until 2019. Well, that’s not what Jason Furman – then a campaign advisor, and now a senior economic official in the Obama Administration – told the New York Times during the 2008 election campaign. In July 2008, he said that:
We think we could get to $2,500 in savings by the end of the first term, or be very close to it.
Mind you, after the election, the Obama Administration did water down their promise, claiming that their “reforms” would now save only $2,000 by 2019 – instead of the $2,500 by 2012/13 that Furman promised on behalf of the campaign. But if you’re the Obama Administration, why wouldn’t you define your premium promise down, such that it would only be met – or broken – years after you leave office?
It’s not surprising that an Administration would attempt to use the soft bigotry of low expectations to try and circumvent the unrealistic nature of their campaign promises after taking office. What is surprising however is when “fact checking” journalists accept these excuses at face value and don’t call them on it.