This could only happen in America: an organization supposedly dedicated to rooting out deception takes the position that semantics trumps reality. According to Politifact, so long as the Republicans call something Medicare the claim that they intend to end what we now know as Medicare is not only untrue, it is, among all the remarkable lies we’ve seen this year, the lie of the year. Paul Krugman tells the tale:
This is really awful. Politifact, which is supposed to police false claims in politics, has announced its Lie of the Year — and it’s a statement that happens to be true, the claim that Republicans have voted to end Medicare.
Steve Benen in the link above explains it, but let me just repeat the basics. Republicans voted to replace Medicare with a voucher system to buy private insurance — and not just that, a voucher system in which the value of the vouchers would systematically lag the cost of health care, so that there was no guarantee that seniors would even be able to afford private insurance.
The new scheme would still be called “Medicare”, but it would bear little resemblance to the current system, which guarantees essential care to all seniors.
How is this not an end to Medicare? And given all the actual, indisputable lies out there, how on earth could saying that it is be the “Lie of the year”?
One suspects that even Orwell would be surprised at this one. Krugman feels this is a question of Politifact wanting to appear to be balanced. I think the folks at Politifact got snookered by the Republican spin machine, and, when called on it, as they were months ago, they decided to dig in rather than admit their mistake. There probably is a bit of attempted balance going on. Had the wronged party been the Republicans, Politifact probably would have come clean.
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