Now They Tell Us

The PolitiFact Lie Of The Year has just been announced.  It's President Obama saying "If you like your health care, you can keep it." Wait a second--wasn't that the lie of 2009 and 2010?  The lie of 2013 comes from the people claiming the President was telling the truth back then.  Sort of late to note it's a lie now.  Let's look back and see what they did consider the biggest lies of those years.

Here's the Lie of 2009:  Sarah Palin claiming Obamacare would include "death panels."  She put it this way, after claiming the law will lead to rationing once the government is in charge and determining how money is spent:

And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. 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.

I think this is essentially correct. Sure, no one will be woken up in the middle of the night and dragged to a government building to plead for his life before a grand inquisitor, but there's certainly a solid chance that government officials will gather in groups of two or more to make life-and-death decisions relating to quality of life (all part of bending the cost curve), decisions that were once mostly determined by doctors and patients and families.  No one should be surprised by this, as it's happened in other countries already.

Here's the Lie of 2010:  Republicans claiming Obamacare is a government takeover of health care.  That's a lie?  I consider it so obviously true I don't understand why we have to debate it.  Almost everything the Affordable Care Act does undercuts a private market in health care and has everyone and everything determined by government regulation.  That, my friends, is a government takeover, even if they want to call it something else.

So there you have it. Back when they could have actually been a useful part of the debate, PolitiFact was busy being partisan. Now that it's too late, they look back and say "sorry, those promises weren't true." At the very least, they should apologize for being so wrong for so long.