How difficult is it to find answers to what’s in the health care bills making their way though Congress?
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/08/12/obama.nh.blur.gi.art.jpg caption="President Barack Obama speaks at a town hall meeting August 11, 2009 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire."]
It’s not easy at all if you pay attention to all those town hall shouts, YouTube clips, and 30 second commercials that have dominated the news and the Internet over the past few weeks. In many instances supporters and opponents of health care reform have reduced a very complex issue into simplistic, completely opposite interpretations about what’s in the bills.
Bill Adair is the Washington Bureau Chief of the St. Petersburg Times, and also the person behind PolitiFact.com, a Web site that seeks to find the truth in complex policy debates. We asked him to assess the accuracy of some of the claims made by the two camps.
- Watch: Health care truths
Opponents of the plans under consideration in the House and Senate say it will create socialized medicine. Supporters say that’s not true because they rely substantially on private health plans. Adair says it’s “not correct to say that it’s nationalizing the health care system or that it’s socialized medicine.” But he adds that there’s enough uncertainty in how the plan might evolve that several years in the future “it could lead to nationalized health care.”
What about keeping your current insurance under a new plan? Critics say you can kiss goodbye to what you have now. The president has said repeatedly that if you have health insurance now, you can keep it just the way it is. Who’s right?
- From Slate.com: Health Care Reform: An Online Guide
If you want to keep up, you must know these Web sites.
That’s a tricky one, says Adair. If a bill is passed similar to those under discussion in the House and Senate, “on day one if you have (for example) ‘Bob’s Health Insurance’... you’ll be able to keep that health insurance...” But, once again, that could change over time. As the market place evolves, Adair says, ‘Bob’s’ might decide they don’t want to offer health insurance anymore.”
The cost of health care reform has also drawn very different conclusions. Opponents, and even some supporters, say it could worsen already large government deficits. The president says the plan will be deficit neutral.
Who’s right? Adair says the president and his Democratic allies are on shaky ground here. He says there are serious questions about how the plan will be paid for, and that predictions of a deficit neutral program rests on “hopeful accounting.”
And then there’s the recent controversy about so-called “death panels”, a term that Sarah Palin used to describe an element in the plan, which allows consultations with doctors about end-of-life services such as hospice.
Palin wrote on Facebook, “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil...”
This one is just not true, say Adair. “No death panels ... that one we gave a ‘pants-on-fire’ on our Truth-O-Meter.