Emmarie Huetteman
Here we go once more.
It’s been a month since Democratic presidential hopefuls final took to the controversy stage, however Tuesday night time in Detroit 10 candidates once more confronted off for the primary of this two-night occasion.
Health coverage points have been a scorching matter.
The match up between Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont was thought-about the marquis occasion, with different candidates — together with Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.; creator Marianne Williamson; Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan; and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke — hoping to make use of the night to face out from the remainder of the first area.
Health care provided every candidates a potent alternative. Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney argued that Medicare for All would “get Trump reelected.” Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana spoke to the plight of the instructor “working a second job to afford her insulin.” And former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who opposes Medicare for All, spoke of how he expanded well being care — a declare we rated mostly true earlier this 12 months when he spoke about steps he took towards attaining common protection.
But even because the candidates put their markers down on the ideological spectrum, not all of their claims totally stood as much as scrutiny.
We fact-checked a few of these remarks.
SANDERS: “Right now, we have a dysfunctional health care system. Eighty-seven million uninsured or under-insured, 500,000 Americans every year going bankrupt because of medical bills, 30,000 people dying while the health care industry makes tens of billions of dollars in profit.”
That’s quite a lot of numbers for a Tuesday night time, and as confidently as Sanders said them, they depend on sophisticated information and, arguably, fuzzy math.
In claiming there are 87 million Americans who’re uninsured or underinsured, he’s citing 2018 information released by the Commonwealth Fund. Compared to the 27.four million uninsured in 2017, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, this consists of these with insurance coverage who nonetheless skilled excessive medical prices in comparison with their family revenue.
It shouldn’t be clear how Sanders calculated the variety of medical bankruptcies yearly. He could also be referring to a research released in February that discovered an estimated 530,000 households file for chapter every year as a consequence of medical payments. However, usually there are various elements that play into submitting for chapter, making it troublesome to pin on medical prices alone.
And although he didn’t full the thought, this isn’t the primary time that Sanders has claimed that 30,000 individuals die yearly due to the excessive price of well being care. When he tweeted that declare final month, we rated it half true as a result of it seems to depend on weak math.
Former Maryland congressman John Delaney additionally reiterated a degree he used within the first spherical of Democratic major debates.
Delaney: “It’s been well documented that if all the bills were paid at Medicare rate, which is specifically — I think it’s in section 1,200 of their bill — then many hospitals in this country would close. I’ve been going around rural America and I ask rural hospital administrators one question: ‘If all your bills were paid at the Medicare rate last year, what would happen?’ And they all look at me and say, ‘We would close.’”
Delaney made this argument to assault Sanders’ Medicare for All plan, which he known as “bad” coverage in his opening assertion. He made this declare about rural hospitals throughout final month’s debates, too. We rated it False.
It is plain that Medicare pays hospitals a fraction of what personal, employer-based insurance coverage pays them. A RAND Health research released earlier this year discovered personal insurers in 2017 paid hospitals 241 p.c of the costs Medicare paid, on common.
But the consultants we spoke with after the final debate mentioned the consequences on hospitals could be extra nuanced: While some could take a success underneath a Medicare for All system, different hospitals could do higher. And it’s unclear how a lot hospitals could be paid underneath Sanders’ plan; that part — it’s truly Section 611 — mainly says the federal authorities would resolve later pay suppliers.
And O’Rourke took on a public well being concern.
O’Rourke: “The Centers for Disease Control (is) prevented from actually studying (gun violence) in the first place.”
This is an outdated Democratic speaking level. The actuality is extra sophisticated.
For twenty years, spending payments included one thing referred to as the Dickey Amendment that mentioned, “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
That language stays, but in 2018, lawmakers added, in a separate report, the phrases “the Secretary of Health and Human Services has stated the CDC has the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence.”
Even the unique Dickey rule didn’t completely forbid analysis.
For a short time at the least, the CDC continued to fund research into the hyperlinks between firearms and accidents, proof to some those that the Dickey modification and analysis may co-exist.
But after 1999, gun analysis plummeted. David Hemenway, director of Harvard’s Injury Control Research Center, advised PolitiFact final 12 months that the politics, not the legislation, drove the CDC’s agenda.
“The CDC always had some flexibility, but it wasn’t going to fund firearms research since it knew it would, as had happened previously, get hauled before Congress and threatened with reduced funding if any research it sponsored suggested that having more firearms was not good for public health,” Hemenway mentioned.
— PolitiFact’s Jon Greenberg contributed to this story.
Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nationwide well being coverage information service. It is an editorially impartial program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which isn’t affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
