Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Pelosi and the ACA

Nancy Pelosi, according to a Truth Index/Politi-Score review done on her last year, is sort of the Democrat version of Michele Bachmann—she has a penchant for making way-out, almost indefensible statements that often catch her Pants on Fire. In this PolitiFact ruling, she claimed that under the new healthcare law (“Obamacare”) “everybody will have lower rates, better quality care and better access." I thought I’d take a look…and found it was “defensible” enough for Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style.

PolitFact’s writer Jon Greenberg gives two caveats to why the “everybody” isn’t true. One is that there’s a “catch” to using averages: some people would pay more than the average, some less. Yes, but if everyone “on average” pay less, they’re still paying less “overall.”

The second caveat, however, is even more “defensible.”

But in its study, the CBO number crunchers actually predict that a large number of people will want to buy better insurance. They would opt for a lower deductible, lower co-pays and a wider range of benefits. That personal choice would cause their total premiums to rise some 27 to 30 percent. For a policy covering just one person, the difference would be about $600 a year, before accounting for any of the subsidies the law provides; over half the people in the individual market would qualify for those subsidies.

PolitiFact’s Greenberg did not consider the “value” of what the person who chose to buy a more expensive policy was trading up to. For example, if the better policy had lower co-pays and deductibles, and the person buying the upgraded policy made use of them, those co-pays and deductibles could more than make up for the price paid. Or, as explained by one writer to PolitiFact in a recent mailbag issue:

I have a strong objection to one element of your analysis. Your second caveat claims that some people will pay more because the ‘discounted’ rate will entice them to purchase better coverage. I fail to see how this has anything to do with the veracity of Pelosi's statement, or lack thereof. Pelosi used the words ‘lower rates.’ Just because people buy more insurance does not necessarily mean the rate increases, since ‘rate,’ in this case, means level of services divided by cost. If people buy better insurance, they pay more, but their level of services increases as well. When people hear ‘lower rates,’ they assume you're talking apples-to-apples for level of service. It may very well be that in light of your first caveat, Pelosi's statement is still False. But the second half of your argument is bogus.

Finally, there’s the underlying argument of “something’s better than nothing"--even if everybody doesn't use it, it's available to everybody. Access to insurance for pre-existing conditions, encouraging preventative care by eliminating cost sharing, allowing young adults to stay on their parent’s plan until they turn 26 years old, closing the Medicare prescription drug donut hole, these are but a few of the many improvements to our healthcare system with ACA.

Often when PolitiFact is evaluating a statement and finds one part arguable (“average coverage”) and another part having some truth (because “rate” and “value” were not taken into consideration), and finally, deem the underlying argument (it should be better than what we have now!) as having truth, they would rate a statement, at least, an inconclusive Half True. But not Democrat Nancy Pelosi talking about the Affordable Care Act. Conservative bias, anyone?

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Pelosi and the Polls

Nancy Pelosi ‘s Truth Index hasn’t been the best this year; in fact, this year she’s even exceeded Michele Bachmann in “UN-truthiness” while Michele has been bringing her score up through the presidential debates. While they are a contradiction in ideologies, their predilection for propaganda seems to go hand in hand.

This particular PolitiFact (PF) ruling on Pelosi sort of stands on that line between Half True and Mostly True. PolitiFact decided to act less “charitably” or to be on the safe side of those who may accuse it of liberal bias, went with Half True. But did she deserve it? She was discussing the public’s approval of congress with Jon Stewart on his Daily Show, when she said “The last time I was here in April of 2009 ... the Democrats were in control and the congressional (approval) rating was 40 percent. Do you remember that?"

Preceding that statement, she provided the contrast: today congressional approval is around a paltry 11% (she used 9%, but at that low a number, it doesn’t make much difference). The underlying argument for Pelosi is that congressional job approval was much higher at that time than it is today, which is undeniably true. Here is a graphic representation from writer Lou Jacobson’s source, Real Clear Politics:

Pelosi's right that the period she specifies (highlighted) has been the most favorable for congress in almost 3 years.

Around the time Pelosi made the claim, as highlighted, the “Congressional Job Approval” average had increased, indeed, almost doubled since January, 2009, and stabilized for several months at just below 40 percent….from March 16 to April 5 of 2009, a period of three weeks, it was within 10 percent, averaging 36 to 37 percent.

PolitiFact also adds this paragraph for the two months surrounding April:

If you look at the months of March, April and May 2009, you’ll find two polls with 41 percent support. Still, all the other polls during that period were lower, and the average for the 13 polls is 35 percent -- still short of the 40 percent mark that Pelosi cited.

Thirty-four percent (15% off) is the “cutoff” for Mostly True. With 13 polls averaging 35 percent, we’re there, well within the cutoff. In April there is one poll which is 5 percent off, but the average is 20% off. The RCP average poll shows that for a three week period going into April, she is within 10 percent of the 40 percent. In May and even in June, there were several periods where the polls were within 10% of her claim.

So we have a strong underlying argument and polling bringing her very close for a Mostly True ruling. Even the Pelosi graphic says “It was 40-ish”—and that’s not enough? Yes, she's short, but not by much.  Instead she gets an equivocal Half True, most likely to satisfy the grumbling conservatives.

Politi-Score: The Six Million Meal Woman

S T R E T C H I N G
the truth more than her face!

 Nancy Pelosi is the subject of this next individual analysis of fact-check to fact-check comparisons with the Politi-Score. In a previous post I stated I was thinking about doing Joe Biden, but he has not had much this year in the way of rulings: Pelosi’s have gone down “a bit” since she lost her position as speaker, but I thought she would serve as a useful female Democratic comparison to Republican Michele Bachmann, who was my initial Politi-Score designee. Pelosi has not had as many rulings as Bachmann so I have to compile her scoring a bit differently: looking at her total rulings up to about a year ago, then comparing them to that year since, as well as to Bachmann.

There’s a total of 22 rulings from all sources: 11 from only PolitiFact up until one year ago (August 2010) and 11 for the period August 2010 to August 2011: from PolitiFact (6), Factcheck.org (4) plus a single one from the Washington Post Fact Checker. Although that single one proved to be a very crucial fact-check in terms of PolitiFact ruling accuracy and/or potential bias.

It turns out Pelosi has been going the way of Bachmann on the Politi-Score, or maybe even the opposite direction, since Bachmann’s PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index has technically improved from a year ago. Pelosi’s “truthiness” has gone down considerably, and her overall average of an almost “Mostly False” negative 41 was a vast drop from a close-to-Half-True negative 4 which was her Truth Index up until about a year ago. This was because in the last year she’s averaged a negative 75 on the PF Truth Index; her Politi-Score for the last year, the combination of all three fact-checkers as a measure, is a negative 77. That’s pretty bad. As my favorite Truth Indexer Steve at Quibbling Potatoes might prove, she’s way out of one standard deviation. In other words, her non-truthfulness is way off the norm.

There were two re-covered fact-checks. The first one was an employment numbers comment that Pelosi’s made frequently in different forms. In April, she said that more jobs were created in the first year of the Obama administration than all eight years of George W. Bush. PolitiFact and Factcheck.org both reviewed this statement. PolitiFact ruled it False while Factcheck.org called it misleading:

Nancy Pelosi accurately — but misleadingly — said more private jobs were created last year than under Bush. Her statement was true. But it's also true that there were still 2,065,000 fewer private jobs in May than there were when Obama took office.

At last year's pace of job creation, it would take until February 2017 just to regain the jobs lost since the high point reached under the previous administration. And it would still take until 2015 to regain all those jobs even under the faster pace of job growth during the last 15 months.

PolitiFact ruled Half True on a statement by Pelosi that “Under a House Republican appropriations bill, "6 million seniors are deprived of meals” concluding as follows:

In other words, Pelosi’s problem wasn’t her math; it was how she reported her math at the event. So ultimately, Pelosi is wrong, but we think she deserves credit for taking a cautious approach in cobbling together her numbers. On balance, we rate he claim Half True.

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post’s The Fact Checker, wasn’t nearly as magnanimous, giving Pelosi’s statement 4 Pinnochios, or the equivalent of a PolitiFact Pants on Fire:

In a city with overheated rhetoric, Pelosi’s statement ranks high on this year’s list of bloviated bluster. It’s bad enough that she repeatedly mixed up 6 million meals and 6 million people — and made no effort to correct the record after her statement was reported in the media. But the figure she used appears to have been invented itself, with little basis in fact.

So, we have PolitiFact saying she took a “cautious approach in cobbling together her numbers”, while the Washington Post Fact Checker titles Pelosi's figures “absurd math.”

Lil White Lies: Silence is NOT Golden

Recently Michele Bachmann made another statement which PolitiFact (PF) ruled as False: “The top 1 percent of income-earners pay about 40 percent of all taxes into the federal government." It generated a lot of commentary at the Facebook page, and a few posted why she was not asked—called or e-mailed-- to clarify her comments. I decided to interject some links to PolitiFact rulings on Bachmann along with this remark: (links embedded instead of displayed)

I think part of the reason Bachmann doesn’t get a break (as opposed to Pelosi) is she does not respond to PolitiFact when they ask her for more detail, or for her sources:

“Bachmann's press office did not return our call...”

“We contacted Bachmann’s office to ask where she got the number, but we didn’t get a response.”

“Analyzing this comment is somewhat tricky, because Bachmann’s time frame is open to interpretation (and her office didn’t return our inquiry seeking an explanation).”

Others took note of my comment for which I got a few “thumbs up” or “likes” as well as this comment from a Julie Baker Morse: (emphasis added)

… for those complaining that Bachmann is treated differently by Politifact: I believe that their rating depends in part upon the perceived intent of those making the statements. Perhaps if Bachmann had not racked up so many untruths, and did not ignore Politifact's requests for clarification, this may have been rated differently. Untruths and fact misrepresentations for most politicians [from all parties] don't happen because THEY are stupid; it's because they believe that Americans are stupid enough to both believe them and re-elect them, no matter what they say and whether or not their statements have been proved false. (4/18/11 ~12:30 p.m.)

Bryan White just had to make an indirect response to me through Morse: (emphasis added)