Factcheck.org On the Cleveland Debate

Kenneth E. Thorpe, professor of health policy at Emory University, is one expert who believes either candidate could achieve substantial cost savings with their plans. But he also told us they are "virtually identical" on big-picture cost-reduction issues like chronic disease management and electronic health records, so neither candidate is justified in claiming theirs is superior in that regard.

Other Health Care Bobbles
Obama misquoted former Labor Secretary Robert Reich again:

Obama: Clinton's own secretary of labor has said that my plan does more to reduce costs.

As we said on Feb 15 and repeated on Feb. 22, Reich didn't say that Obama's plan does more to cut costs. He said in his blog on Dec. 3, 2007, that Obama's plan "puts more money up front," but on Jan. 13 he amended that, saying all Democratic plans "spend nearly an identical amount of money." He drew no conclusion in either article about the relative merits of the overall cost-cutting proposals of the two candidates.

Also, Obama again used an inflated statistic to support his argument that Clinton's health care plan wouldn't cover everybody despite inclusion of a personal mandate requiring individuals to obtain coverage.

Obama: If it was not affordable, she would still presumably force them to have it, unless there is a hardship exemption as they've done in Massachusetts, which leaves 20 percent of the uninsured out.

Actually, as we noted the last time Obama used this figure, state officials believe they exempted roughly 15 percent of the uninsured, not 20 percent. They now believe there were more persons without insurance than they had originally estimated, so the percent that have been exempted may turn out to be even lower than that.

NAFTA
Obama again accused Clinton of being a supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and she said she wasn't. Both were being misleading.

Clinton: You know, I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning. I didn't have a public position on it, because I was part of the administration, but when I started running for the Senate, I have been a critic. I've said it was flawed.

Obama: Well, I think that it is inaccurate for Senator Clinton to say that she's always opposed NAFTA. In her campaign for Senate, she said that NAFTA, on balance, had been good for New York and good for America.

We've been over this in detail in two recent articles, on Feb. 24 (updated on Feb. 26 with additional information) and on Feb. 25. So we'll just summarize briefly here.