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The Lie of the Year
My suggestion for 2020’s award.
Every year, the fact-checking site PolitiFact awards a “lie of the year.” The site’s first lie of the year award in 2009 went to Sarah Palin’s claim that the Affordable Care Act would lead to “death panels.”
PolitiFact attempts to highlight lies from both sides of the aisle. In 2011, the lie of the year went to the DCCC after they claimed that Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal would “eliminate Medicare.”
But before offering my humble suggestion for this year’s prestigious award, I would first like to go back to December 12, 2013. On that day, PolitiFact awarded “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” as that year’s winner.
The phrase, used by President Obama, became a rallying cry for defenders of the Affordable Care Act. It was meant to assuage nervous Americans as healthcare underwent its most dramatic change since Medicare.
The right became fascinated with the political saying. “Was it the biggest mistake of your presidency to tell the nation over and over ‘if you like your insurance you can keep your insurance,’” Bill O’Reilly asked President Obama during a Super Bowl halftime interview.
But even by PolitiFact’s own calculus, less than 2% of the total insured population received cancellation letters…
