WASHINGTON — As President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney rhetorically sparred in Wednesday night’s televised debate, both candidates exhibited a propensity toward misstatements, falsehoods and exaggerations.
From the economy to immigration, health care to military spending, both Romney and Obama sometimes played fast and loose with the facts.
Here’s a look at some of what was said:
MEDICARE
Romney repeated his claim that Obama took $716 billion from Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.”
The law would reduce Medicare spending by $716 billion from 2013 to 2022, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. But the spending reduction wouldn’t affect services for seniors, because the trims would come mainly in lower annual payment increases to hospitals and other providers, higher premiums for affluent beneficiaries and lower payments to Medicare Advantage plans, the private plans that provide Medicare benefits.
The Medicare spending reductions also would be supplemented by new revenue from a health care law payroll tax on high-income workers and new fees on drug companies, medical device makers and insurers — all industries that will see substantial new revenue when the law provides coverage for millions of uninsured Americans in 2014.
Romney said he would repeal the health care law, and that doing so would put the $716 billion back into the program.
But the CBO said repealing the law would raise the deficit by $109 billion over the next decade.
Doing so also would eliminate its savings and revenue provisions for Medicare and would cause Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund to become insolvent eight years earlier — in 2016 instead of 2024, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
That’s because the projected $716 billion in reduced Medicare spending under the health care law would disappear if the law was repealed.
JOBS
Obama claimed he created 5 million private-sector jobs over the last 30 months. This does not take into account the loss of government jobs — federal, state and local — that has occurred during his administration.
And it doesn’t take into account the job losses in his early months, when the economy was shedding a staggering 800,000-plus jobs per month.
Economists don’t blame him for these losses, as they were part of the Great Recession, which ended in his fifth full month in office. But if you add up the jobs numbers during his entire term, the net on private-sector jobs is in the ballpark of 300,000.
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