Politi-Score: Healthcare Lies Making You Sick?

For the 2011 first quarter compilation of PolitiFact (PF) rulings, I decided, for the first time, to include the "topic."  PolitiFact calls it the "subject" at the top line of its sources and authors to the right of its ruling page under the heading "About This Statement".  The subjects are often multiple, so this task took longer than I thought as I wanted to confine the ruling to a single topic; it often involved reading through the ruling to determine more precisely what PF was  trying to find the "truth" of.

For this post, the Democrats and Republicans will not be juxtaposed against each other; instead, thus far in 2011, the interest is in what subjects are lied about the most, or at the other end, what are the subjects for which politicians are more likely to tell the truth.  So this Politi-Score is calculated to include all political affiliations (as well as none).

First off, here is the distribution of the top ten (by percentage of total) subjects or topics for the PolitiFact's first quarter of 2011: (with "Other" as the "eleventh" subject)

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The "Other" category--topics making up less than 3 percent each--included such subjects as abortion, the birthers, corporations, diversity, LBGT issues, foreign policy, guns and gun control, history, regulations, religion, terrorism, veterans and weather, to name a few.  And for those interested, the birther issue scored a very low 19.

Here are the "Top Ten" subjects in order of lowest (least truthful) to highest (most truthful) as calculated by the Politi-Score:

Almost half the rulings representing Number Two Least Truthful, the topic Jobs, Labor and Unions, were from PolitiFact Wisconsin, for whom I had reported a very low PolitiFact Score earlier.  PF Wisconsin's Politi-Score individually for this topic is 27.  If PF Wisconsin was not included, the Politi-Score on this topic would be brought up to a 46, making it an almost Half True more on average with the rest of the Politi-Scores.

The relative truthfulness about the economy and government budgets and deficits surprised me, but being as Republicans have had "Obamacare" in their cross hairs for some time (and I don't care if that's politically incorrect to say), I suppose the untruths about health care will continue.  I'll find out if I'm wrong as I continue to gather subject/topic data in my PF ruling database.