"Let me tell you another one!"
Rather surprisingly, one thing we didn't hear from Mitt Romney in Tuesday night's debate was the $716-billion-cut-from-Medicare lie. Maybe he got it out of his system in the
last debate when we heard it 10 times. But that doesn't mean that Mitt wasn't absolutely full of it when it came to Medicare and to health care policy in the debate. No, far from it.
Kaili Joy Gray already documented Romney's most glaring lie when it comes to health care: his insistence that: "I don't believe that bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not, and I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care or not." Romney's been a supporter of the Blunt Amendment to limit women's health care from the beginning.
But there's plenty more. Let's delve into the transcript to see what else Romney decided to lie about.
"And there's no question but that Obamacare has been an extraordinary deterrent to enterprises of all kinds hiring people."
Romney's been making that claim for a while, based on a Chamber of Commerce online survey of businesses. The Chamber itself released
this caveat about the survey: “This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.” The
real analysis of jobs and Obamacare has been done by the Congressional Budget Office: "[T]he legislation, on net, will reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by a small amount—roughly half a percent—primarily by reducing the amount of labor that workers choose to supply." The CBO goes on to say that workers themselves, who will have access to affordable health insurance, will likely choose not to take on second or third jobs because they won't have to.
What we have seen is that companies like Papa John's and Darden Restaurants, the Olive Garden and Red Lobster conglomerate, are choosing to circumvent the law by cutting hours for current employees and making new jobs part time. But not by actually cutting the number of employees.
Here's another Obamacare lie from Romney:
"[Obama] said that by now, middle-income families would have a reduction in their health insurance premiums by $2,500 a year. It’s gone up by $2,500 a year. And if Obamacare is passed—or implemented—it’s already been passed—if it’s implemented fully, it will be another $2,500 on top.
Partially true. As health care costs have continued to rise,
premiums have gone up following a long-standing trend. But here's the thing: President Obama did not promise that the insurance savings would be immediate.
Here's what he's said:
September 10, 2010 -- President Obama on Friday said that "bending the cost curve on health care is hard to do," and the administration's goal in the health care law is to "slowly bring down those costs."
Millions of uninsured Americans will gain coverage under the new law, Obama said. And "at the margins that's going to increase our costs, we knew that." Nonetheless, the long-term trends for how much families will pay for their coverage will be improved because of the law, he said. [...]
"But I said at the time, it wasn't going to happen tomorrow, it wasn't going to happen next year. It took us decades to get into a position where our health care costs were going up 6, 7, 10 percent a year. And so our goal is to slowly bring down those costs."
On Medicare:
He said he would have by now put forward a plan to reform Medicare and Social Security, because he pointed out they're on the road to bankruptcy. He would reform them. He'd get that done. He hasn't even made a proposal on either one. [...]
[...] I’ll make sure we can reform Medicare and Social Security to preserve them for coming generations. The President said he would. He didn’t.
That one sort of fits into the larger $716-billion-out-of-Medicare lie, because of course the Affordable Care Act included Medicare reforms. Those reforms, including the $716 billion that's actually a credit back to Medicare, basically, extends the solvency of the program. That was a real Medicare reform
enacted by Obama. And it was a good enough idea that Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, included it in his budget.
These weren't the biggest of Romney's lies Tuesday night. Not compared to Libya or binders full of women or China (phew, that list gets long fast). But they sure do add to the steaming pile Romney left on the debate hall floor.