News Reporter: Fact Checker: President Trump says insurance companies have made billions from Obamacare. It’s the opposite.

Friday, 20 October 2017

Fact Checker: President Trump says insurance companies have made billions from Obamacare. It’s the opposite.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

President Trump keeps saying insurance companies have made billions from Obamacare. It's the opposite.

After using executive power to roll back the cost sharing reduction subsidies (CSR) — an element of the Affordable Care Act that help low-income people afford health insurance — the president has justified his decision saying, "We want the money to go to the people….The insurance companies have absolutely taken advantage of this country and our people. And I stopped it by stopping the CSRs."

The Affordable Care Act required insurance companies to offer plans with reduced deductibles and co-pays for lower income Americans with the understanding that the federal government would make up the difference through CSRs. The subsidies were designed so that the insurance company would neither make or lose money by providing these plans. (We previously gave the president Four Pinocchios for suggesting CSRs were bailouts.)

Though stock prices of health-insurance companies are soaring, government data shows that they lost more than $6 billion by participating in the Obamacare exchanges in 2015 alone. Since the exchanges began, Aetna says it is on track to lose a quarter of a billion dollars by participating. These losses are a major contributing factor to why insurers are leaving the exchanges.

As a one-time business executive, Trump should realize there is more than one way to turn a profit. His misleading rhetoric earns him Four Pinocchios.

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Dueling claims on guns are fact-checked — and found wanting

In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 dead and hundreds injured, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle weighed in on the need (or lack thereof) for tougher gun laws to prevent future tragedies.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was seriously injured during the shooting at a baseball practice in June, suggested tough gun laws don't impact gun violence saying: "You go to a city like Chicago, some of the toughest gun laws in the country are in the city of Chicago and yet they have the worst gun violence."

There's no doubt that Chicago has struggled with gun violence, but looking at two per capita analyses — of homicides and non-fatal shootings in U.S. cities — Chicago didn't top either list. Plus, the city's reputation for having the "toughest gun laws" comes from two statues that are no longer on the books.

It is misleading to point to one city as evidence that these laws don't work, especially considering Scalise's use of shoddy data and outdated legislation as evidence. We awarded Scalise Four Pinocchios.

On the other side of the debate, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a vocal gun control advocate said: "What we know is that states that have tougher gun laws, that keep criminals from getting guns, that keep those dangerous weapons like AR-15s out of the hands of civilians, have dramatically lower rates of gun violence."

It's challenging to find well designed studies that look at gun deaths because so many factors are involved. Even if the researchers control for poverty, unemployment, incarceration rates, changes in policing, there could still be other compounding, location-specific factors that influence the results.

The majority of studies that do exist include suicides in the total number of gun deaths. But in a previous column we found that removing suicides, which make up nearly 60 percent of gun deaths, changes the results of these studies, sometimes dramatically.

Plus, the data to support Murphy's claim on the assault weapon ban is thin at best. We've noted before that the 10-year assault weapons ban did little to reduce gun violence. We awarded Murphy Three Pinocchios.

Fact Checker news!

It's a sad, but exciting week on The Fact Checker. Michelle Ye Hee Lee, founder of this newsletter and Fact Checker extraordinaire, has joined The Washington Post's political enterprise and investigations team. Read more about her new gig where she'll focus on the role of money in politics. She has been essential to our coverage over the last few years and we'll miss her, but luckily she hasn't gone far.

We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @nikki_lew or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter.

Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup.

–Meg Kelly