Who is fact checking the “Fact Checker?”
As the right makes its last stand against Obamacare, don’t look to the corporate media to tell the truth, or honestly check the facts. An example of this is the Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler, who proves himself to be just another pseudo-journalist willing to tell outright mistruths to denigrate President Obama and the ACA.
The video below clearly lays out Kessler’s lies, using the Federal Registerd that Kessler himself cites to justify his blatant lies about Obamacare, and the ‘grandfathering’ of individual health insurance plans.
The “Fact Checker” article from the Washington Post can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
This is the Federal Register he cites: https://webapps.dol.gov/...
In a nutshell Kessler describes the HHS regulations as "extremely tight" for a plan to maintain grandfathered status. He uses regulations pertaining to co-pays as his proof. This is the paragraph from the article:
If you dig into the regulations (go to page 34560), you will see that HHS wrote them extremely tight. One provision says that if co-payment increases by more than $5, plus medical cost of inflation, then the plan can no longer be grandfathered. (With last year’s inflation rate of 4 percent, that means the co-pay could not increase by more than $5.20.)
Mr. Kessler shows the ability to combine two misleading lies into one paragraph.
LIE #1 - The "$5 plus medical cost of inflation" is not based on the CPI inflation rate, which Kessler states as 4%. The calculation is based on medical inflation, which is substantially higher than the overall inflation rate. The regulations which Kessler links to provides the definition of medical inflation. The regulations show that in one year medical inflation was actually 22%.
LIE #2 - This is the BIG LIE. The same regulations that Kessler cites clearly list two methods that an insurance company can use to increase a co-pay without losing the plan's grandfathered status. The second, which I show clearly in the video, is by raising the co-pay by a percentage not greater than the rate of medical inflation PLUS 15%.
The regulations go on the give an example of a plan raising its co-pay from $30, to $40, and maintaining its grandfathered status because the increase in co-pay was 33%, which was less than the allowed increase of 37% based on what is known as the Maximum Percentage Increase.
So the idea that a co-pay could have increased by only $5.20 is a LIE. Failing to point out that the law provides TWO methods to calculate co-pay increases is a BIG LIE.
So without a doubt, Glenn Kessler is either incompetent, or a flat out liar, or both. Either way, he is a disgrace to journalism and can never be trusted when discussing Obamacare.