President Obama recently claimed that health care inflation has “gone down every single year” since Obamacare passed. The Washington Post gave his claim three Pinocchios. WaPo,
First, note that the president simply notes that health-care costs have gone down every year since the law passed, thus cleverly avoiding a causal connection. But he certainly implies it, and that’s the message most viewers might have received.
But as we have said, the evidence for a direct connection is fuzzy — and certainly in dispute…
In fact, despite the president’s claim of a decrease of every year, the White House’s own chart shows that the 2013 estimate represents a slight uptick from 2012, when adjusted for inflation and population…
When making a claim like this, the president needs to get his statistics right. He is trying to say that Obamacare is responsible for the slowdown in health-care costs, without directly saying so. But he should acknowledge that although the overall trend is positive, the impact of his health-care law remains unclear. Uttering this claim without any caveats is going too far, even when making allowances for the fact he is speaking extemporaneously.
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