News Reporter: Fact Checker: Both parties are spinning you on health care. We sorted through their rhetoric to bring you the facts.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

Both parties are spinning you on health care. We sorted through their rhetoric to bring you the facts.

This week’s news cycle was dominated by the GOP replacement bill for the Affordable Care Act, and the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the bill.

Health care is complicated. And as we say at The Fact Checker: The more complicated the topic, the more it is prone to spin. Both parties spun findings by the non-partisan economic research arm of Congress, so we checked out their claims.

First, we’ll take a look at two common GOP claims, made by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. For the full list, check out our round-up.

"CBO coverage estimates are consistently wrong and more importantly do not take into consideration the comprehensive nature of this three-prong plan to repeal and replace Obamacare with the American Health Care Act."

Spicer dings the CBO for having greatly overestimated the number of people who would buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges, in particular a projection that 23 million would be on the exchanges by 2016; it actually was 10 million.

But this was just one part of a larger estimate — how many would gain insurance — that CBO got largely right. CBO projected that 30 million people (or 11 percent of the population under 65) would not have health insurance in 2016, when the actual number turned out to be 27.9 million (10.3 percent).

So Spicer is playing a bit of a shell game here. He is trying to discredit CBO's larger coverage estimate — that 24 million fewer people would have insurance by 2026 than under current law — by focusing on an error in an element of the larger forecast. But apples to apples, CBO got the larger forecast mostly correct.

A 2015 study by the Commonwealth Fund concluded, "The CBO's projections were closer to realized experience than were those of many other prominent forecasters."

As for the "three-prong plan," the two other elements have not been unveiled and thus CBO could not consider them. The third element — major changes in insurance regulations — would require the support of at least eight Democrats in the Senate, which is highly unlikely at this moment.

"I think the big difference, just so we're clear, is that we posted this bill online, the Speaker had it out there, the President tweeted it out. Anyone in the country and anyone in the world, could read it. That's a vastly different approach than after it's being done, told, after we pass it you can read it, which is what Speaker Pelosi said."

The Nancy Pelosi quote cited by Spicer is often taken out of context, as she inelegantly tried to make the point that media coverage had obscured the content of the legislation. This is the full quote, made during a speech given by then-Speaker on March 9, 2010, as the law neared final passage:

"You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention — it's about diet, not diabetes. It's going to be very, very exciting. But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

We previously gave Four Pinocchios to White House budget director Mick Mulvaney for also claiming that the passage of the Affordable Care Act was not transparent. There were numerous public hearings– at least 20 in the House–and the versions of the bills were posted online for people to read.

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And now, a common Democratic claim.

Democratic lawmakers have made a number of misleading claims about the bill. Our full round-up is here. For this newsletter, we’ll focus on the most repeated claim.

"Is it an act of mercy to throw 24 million people off of health insurance, so Republicans can hand billionaires a massive new tax giveaway?"
— House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)

"But what this bill does is it takes away health care from 14 million people in the next year, 24 million over ten years."
— Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.)

"Actually, according to the CBO score, 14 million people will lose their insurance next year and 24 million people ultimately will lose their insurance."
— Rep. Linda T. Sánchez (Calif.)

The two headline-grabbing estimates from the CBO report have been taken out of context by some lawmakers, including Pelosi and Sanchez. The CBO estimated that under the GOP replacement bill, 14 million fewer people would be insured in 2018 than under the current health-care law and 24 million fewer people insured by 2026.

But this does not mean all of the 14 million or 24 million will be "thrown off" health insurance or "lose" health insurance.

Some of the people who would be uninsured would choose not to have insurance, because they only decided to obtain health insurance to avoid a penalty under the ACA's individual mandate; the replacement bill eliminates the mandate. Others, such as elderly Americans, would not get insurance because the premiums are too high. (The replacement bill would allow the elderly be charged five times as much as the youngest insured, compared with a 3:1 ratio under the ACA.) Many of the uninsured people would lose insurance because of reductions in Medicaid enrollment — after some states discontinue the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.

CBO estimated that the GOP bill would lead to 14 million fewer insured people than under Obamacare by 2018. Six million of 14 million would be people who now have coverage in the individual insurance market; 5 million would be people with coverage under Medicaid; and 2 million would be people with coverage through their employers, who also would no longer be required to provide insurance.

"Most of the reductions in coverage in 2018 and 2019 would stem from repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate," CBO found.

The CBO estimated that health insurance premiums would be 10 percent lower in 2026 than projected under current law. That's because insurance premiums would spike for older people (20 to 25 percent higher for a 64-year-old) and many older people would drop out of the insurance markets. Then the pool of people getting insurance would be younger and healthier, leading to lower premiums than currently projected. But it's important to remember that it does not mean that premiums would decline by 10 percent, just that they would increase at a lower rate than now projected.

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Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio roundup.

— Michelle Ye Hee Lee

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