OK, some people have asked me to comment on SinglePayerGate, the claim that the Sanders single-payer health plan would actually increase health spending, and that Sanders is lying when he says otherwise. 1/ theweek.com/articles/79123…
As the Cooper article says, the Mercatus Center is pushing this claim even though ITS OWN ANALYSIS says the plan would reduce total spending -- and fact-checkers have fallen right into the trap, as well as buying into false claims about the plan's impact on providers 2/
But wait, there's more. Mercatus is not a trustworthy source; it's not so much the Koch financial backing as its history of producing politically skewed analyses. There are think tanks with a viewpoint that nonetheless can be trusted to report facts. Mercatus isn't one of them 3/
And Charles Blahouse, the author of this study, has a particular history of peddling phony arguments on health care 4/ krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/ano…
I find all this quite ominous. It seems that even in the Trump era the media, including fact-checkers, are addicted to bothsidesism -- they feel compelled to label something on the left a lie every time they find a lie on the right 5/
Remember when Politifact's lie of the year was the claim that Republicans had voted to end Medicare, which was actually ... true? (They voted to replace it with a voucher program called Medicare bearing little resemblance to the current program) 6/ huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/20/pol…
The fact that this kind of thing is still happening is a very, very bad omen for our future 7/
