Biden's made-up claim on hospital bed statistics Cases of Alzheimer's disease are expected to rise as the U.S. population becomes older on average. But President Biden chose a funny way of illustrating this trend: with a bogus statistic seemingly plucked from thin air. "You know, if we don't do something about Alzheimer's in America, every single, solitary hospital bed that exists in America — as the nurses can tell you — every single one will be occupied in the next 15 years with an Alzheimer's patient — every one," the president said in Cleveland on May 27. In a classic Biden twist, the event horizon for this Alzheimer's epidemic seems to change with each speech, from 19 years, to 20 years, to 15 years in this telling. But no one at the White House would explain where Biden got these figures, and publicly available sources of data show he was way off-base. We did some back-of-the-envelope math and found that even when giving Biden every benefit of the doubt and using assumptions generous to him, the number would conceivably, perhaps, go up to 50 percent, but nowhere near 100 percent. Biden earned Four Pinocchios. It's worth noting that Alzheimer's patients spend time in hospital beds but that is not where they end up. Hospitalization is often considered harmful and costly for people with dementia-related diseases, so the less time spent in a hospital, the better. People with Alzheimer's often end up in long-term nursing-home care and eventually hospice care. The president is focused on hospital beds, but that's not necessarily an important problem. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrong again Greene, for those who need a refresher, is the Republican congresswoman from Georgia who pushed Q-Anon conspiracy theories and made comments calling for the deaths of leading Democrats. We don't make it a habit to fact check everything she says. But this one cried out for a history lesson. At an "America First" rally May 27, Greene claimed "Nazis were the National Socialist Party, just like the Democrats are now a national socialist party." This comparison is ... badly flawed. Just because the word "socialist" appears in the full name of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party, and some Democrats in the United States describe themselves as "socialist" now, doesn't mean the two groups share goals or policy prescriptions. The Nazi party platform openly called for things such as racial purity and expelling foreigners. Some U.S. Democrats are calling for ambitious policies that redistribute wealth at a time of historic gaps between the rich and poor. The Nazi party was largely supported by small-business men and conservative industrialists, not the proletariat. Still, left-wing parties such as the Communists and Social Democrats were major parties in 1920s Germany so the inclusion of "socialist" in the party's name was attractive to working-class voters who might also be anti-Semitic. Hitler adamantly rejected socialist ideas, dismantled or banned left-leaning parties and disapproved of trade unions. Greene easily earned Four Pinocchios. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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