One of the big problems with all these Politifact sites and their franchisees and knockoffs is you never know what part of a political statement the fact checkers are analyzing. Often the prepositional phrase is more important to the fact checker but the past participial verb before the object is the basis of the impression the politiican wants to leave you with.1 And sometimes the opposite is true.
For example, the September 7, 2012 Washington Post Wonkblog rated a typical anecdotal sob story about healthcare by Barack Obama "True" by stating the following:
"The (Patient Protection and) Affordable Care Act (PPACA) ended lifetime limits on coverage(,) a provision estimated to affect 105 million Americans with private insurance coverage."
Under Wonkblog's classification system (not to be confused with the WaPo Pinnochio classification system or the other guy's Pants on Fire system), the best this Obama statement deserves is a "True with a But." Obama clearly wanted listeners to think PPACA elminated lifetime limits in healthcare insurance for all Americans. And WaPo cooperated by providing its carefully parsed sentence and linking to an Obama campaign document that -- after further reading and un-parsing -- tells you that the statement only relates to "Americans" between ages 0 and 64.
That's because the elmination of lifetime limits in PPACA does not appear to affect2 those of us on Medicare according to MedPAC. That's why President Obama didn't talk about the disabled guy in Miami who was ready for heart treatment but had used up his lifetime "Medicare days."
-- Dennis Byron
NOTES:
1 I have no idea if the adjective "past-participial" is even a word.
2 I have not actually read the 2000 pages of PPACA. I only assume PPACA does not affect us senior citizens relative to life-time limits because MedPAC recommended the elimination of Medicare's lifetime limits in 2011 and I assume it would not have done that if PPACA already eliminated it in 2010. In December 2011, Wyden-Ryan recommended adding catastrophic coverage to Medicare, which would end Medicare's lifetime limits.
