Politifact Labels Obama's Latest ObamaCare Lie, 'Pants On Fire'

The Washington Examiner dug up six separate columns between 2008 and 2012, in which Politifact examined the truthfulness of Obama’s oft repeated claim that “you can keep your plan” and not once did the influential fact checker correctly label it as false. It was instead labeled “half true.”

Now, via Weasel Zippers, we find that they have labeled Obama’s latest lie to cover up that lie, “Pants on Fire.”

According to Obama, “What we said was you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

But we found at least 37 times since Obama’s inauguration where he or a top administration official made a variation of the pledge that if you like your plan, you can keep it, and we never found an instance in which he offered the caveat that it only applies to plans that hadn’t changed after the law’s passage.

And seven of those 37 cases came after the release of the HHS regulations that defined the “grandfathering” process, when the impact would be clear.

While Sebelius’ teleconference with reporters did provide that sort of caveat, in other instances, such as her blog post, she focused on the upside, not the downside. Her one mention of the extent to which grandfathered plans might be doomed strikes us as the equivalent of the fine print on a television commercial running in heavy rotation.

Obama is ignoring the overwhelming majority of times he addressed the issue, where most people would have heard it. We rate his claim Pants on Fire.

But the original lie, remains “half true” as far as Politifact is concerned.