March 20, 2014 03:19 PM UTC

Politifact: AFP Anti-Udall Obamacare Ad Rates "False"

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• by: Colorado Pols

As posted today by leading national fact-checking site Politifact, operated by the Tampa Bay Times:

"People don’t like political ads. I don’t like them either. But health care isn’t about politics," she says. "It’s about people. And millions of people have lost their health insurance, millions of people can’t see their own doctors, and millions are paying more and getting less."

We’ve tackled claims about lost insurance and access to personal doctors before. But we haven’t heard someone say that the health care law is causing people to pay more for less, so we decided to check it out.

Politifact says that the first two claims in Americans For Prosperity's TV spot running in Colorado against incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall–that "millions of people have lost their health insurance" and that "millions of people can’t see their own doctors" as "False" and "Mostly False" respectively, based on equivalent statements made by GOP House Speaker John Boehner and Sen. Marco Rubio. But the third claim made by this ad, that "millions are paying more and getting less," was sufficiently unexplored that Politifact made a deep dive. And the verdict:

Other than a sharp increase between 2010 to 2011, the Obama years have experienced the smallest rate increases of the last 14 years. [Pols emphasis] Throughout much of the early 2000s, premium increases of 9 percent or more were the norm.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid also found a slowdown in the increase in health costs during the last four years, including a modest 4 percent increase from 2011 to 2012…

Americans for Prosperity said "millions are paying more and getting less" under Obamacare. We found their explanation of "less" rather dubious. Most people on the individual market are getting more benefits under the law. At worst, they’re paying more to get more, though in many cases they’re actually paying less.

We rate this claim False.

By thoroughly exploring this key claim in AFP's new ad, and rating it unequivocally false–along with the other claims in the ad already rated either false or mostly so–Politifact goes even farther than 9NEWS' Brandon Rittiman, whose solid debunking of this ad has given Democrats another tool to fight back against AFP's enormous ad buy. There's no equivalent in federal law to Colorado's law outlawing false political advertising, and we haven't heard a legal opinion as to whether or not this ad could be pulled down under Colorado's law. But if there's anybody out there who has seen this ad saturating Colorado media markets–which is everybody–and hasn't learned that it's been totally discredited–which is almost everybody–Democrats need to get the facts out.

Because Americans For Prosperity is counting on the voters never getting the facts.