The Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity should be renamed Americans for Full Employment of Fact Checkers. Yep, another ad, another debunking. This one isn't against a Democrat, but for Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI). It includes footage from a town meeting in which an elderly man says "This Affordable Care Act, I am going to have bureaucrats telling me what kind of services I am going to qualify for. To be honest with you, I’m scared to death."
Ah, death panels, because that's the scariest thing they can keep peddling to seniors. But the full story isn't about death panels, but those pesky Medicare cuts, because clearly, this man is on Medicare. The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler is back on the beat. He's got the full footage of the town meeting from C-SPAN.
First of all, it’s clear that AFP put two unrelated parts of the conversation together. The first part, about bureaucrats, is related to the Affordable Care Act. The second part is about Medicare. [...]
Here’s his full quote: "I've got Medicare right now but they took $700 billion out of it to put into the Affordable Care Act and what is that going to do to my coverages? To be honest with you, I am scared to death."
And so Kessler has to go into the whole $700 billion in Medicare cuts again. At least he's got the answer to that one easily at hand, since that one has been debunked about a bajillion times since 2010. To recap: It's not Medicare benefits cuts, it's cuts to payments to private insurers for Medicare Advantage plans, which only about 28 percent of Medicare beneficiaries have. And Obamacare has actually "raised Medicare payroll taxes by $318 billion over the 10-year time frame, further strengthening the program’s financial condition." And Rep. Paul Ryan's budgets since 2011 have all contained the same cuts, and virtually every Republican in the House has voted for them.
Kessler, being the "objective" type he figures he's supposed to be, says "AFP should be wary of using a clip to score political points when the speaker was making an assertion based on misinformation." Yeah, right. Because AFP is concerned about accuracy in their ads. At least Kessler can be certain of his job security.