In fact, the law curbs future growth in Medicare over 10 years, but does not cut any benefits for participating seniors or affect the current Medicare budget at all, as Politifact New Jersey reported when Congressman Jon Runyan, R-N.J., said it again in a press release.
5. The provision of the Affordable Care Act that allows people to stay on their parents’ insurance plan until age 26 has helped 6.6 million young adults obtain coverage.
Both FactCheck.org and The Post's Fact Checker have concluded that the White House is fudging the numbers on this one. The Obama team is using findings from a survey by the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, which estimated that 6.6 million young people were able to join their parents’ health plan as a result of the Affordable Care Act. However, not all those young adults were uninsured prior.
More accurately, the Health and Human Services Department put the figure at 3.3 million young adults who would not have health insurance without the provision.
6. Obamacare is a job-killer, and three-quarters of U.S. businesses say they are less likely to hire people because of it.
Republicans often make these claims, as Romney did on Thursday. FactCheck.org has called the job-killer tag “health-care hooey … with little basis in fact.” CBO has projected the law could cause a slight dip in employment due to people deciding to work less or retire earlier because they won’t be dependent on health plans from their employer. The agency also said job gains in the health and insurance fields might boost overall employment.
The three-quarters figure comes from an online, opt-in survey of small-business executives by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That means, as FactCheck.org notes, that it was a self-selected sample that may not be representative of all small-business executives. The Chamber acknowledged as much in its press release on the survey, saying it was “not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.”
7. Preventive care saves the government money and, under the health care law, has already helped 54 million people in private insurance plans.
Obama has often touted the fact that under the health law, all insurance plans are required to cover preventive medicine at no cost. In his remarks after the Supreme Court ruling, he went a step further, saying that the provision had already helped 54 million people.
While it’s true that crunching numbers from the Kaiser Family Foundation does yield that figure for the number of people who are receiving expanded preventive care services as a result of the health care law, there’s no saying if their plans before included some of the same or how much they’re being “helped” by the new suite of services.
Moreover, Obama has said that preventive care actually saves money by catching and managing illnesses before they become critical. Politifact, however, found evidence to the contrary. A 2009 CBO study found that preventive services lead to “higher, not lower, medical spending overall,” because while mammograms, checkups, and the like are cheap for the individual, the cost of all of them put together adds up. Because they only catch disease and illness for a small sliver of people who are tested, while they are good for people’s well-being, so far they haven’t brought costs down.
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