Thread by @charles_gaba

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

https://twitter.com/politifact/status/1286394320413761536

According to @loujacobson of @PolitiFact, if a President promises NOT to do a thing, then TRIES to do a thing but fails because Congress shot it down, that means they "kept their promise." 2/

So if I promise NOT to commit murder, and once elected I *attempt* to commit murder but I'm stopped by the police before I can pull it off, I guess that means I get credit for "keeping my promise". 3/

By this logic, if Bernie Sanders was elected President and *tried* to pass #M4All but failed to do so because Congress shot it down, he would still have "kept his promise" because "he tried".

HEY EVERYONE! IT TURNS OUT OBAMA PASSED UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS AFTER ALL!

I'd like to point out that @PolitiFact often does good work--I've been used as a resource by them myself on a number of ACA/healthcare issues--but this is absurd.

They seriously need to add a new category:

Here's a fun story for you: Throughout 2017, Trump kept on vowing to "blow up" and destroy the #ACA exchanges by cutting off CSR reimbursement payments to insurance carriers.

He THOUGHT that doing this would cut subsidies off to millions of low-income ACA enrollees. 1/

What Trump DIDN'T understand (to be fair it's a bit counter-intuitive) is that ACA CSR subsidies work differently from ACA premium subsidies.

With *premium* subsidies, the federal gov't pays a portion of your premiums for you to the carriers. 2/

With CSR subsidies, however, the CARRIERS agree to pay a chunk of your deductible/co-pays to the healthcare *provider* (doc/hospital), and was then *reimbursed* by the federal government the following month. That's a critical difference, which Trump clearly didn't understand. 3/

So instead of screwing over millions of low-income enrollees as he intended, he actually screwed over the *insurance carriers* out of several billion dollars in *reimbursed expenses* they were contractually obligated to cover. 4/

Now, you may think "hooray! screw the insurance carriers!"...except that a) the feds broke a legal contract and b) the carriers made up for it by changing their policy pricing to something called #SilverLoading, which I've written about a few times... 5/

The carriers figured out how much they expected to have to shell out in CSR payments the following year & tacked that onto their *premium hikes* instead. As a result, in 2018, average ACA premiums jumped a whopping ~27% on average...over half of which was to cover CSR losses. 6/

However, most of the carriers ended up doing something very smart: Instead of spreading the CSR cost evenly across all of their policies, they loaded all their CSR chips onto *Silver* plans only (thus #SilverLoading). This resulted in some very interesting pricing. 7/

In some parts of the country, this meant that some Gold plans ended up costing around the same as some Silver plans...but more importantly, ACA *premium* subsidies are based on *the cost of Silver plans* (1 specific Silver plan, actually). 8/

Because of this, if that benchmark Silver plan premium increases *more than the Bronze or Gold plans*, it results in several million ACA enrollees seeing their premium subsidies increase dramatically, especially when applied to a Bronze or Gold plan instead of Silver. 9/

In the end, more people ended up benefitting from #SilverLoading in the form of reduced subsidies than those who lost out by having to pay higher (unsubsidized) prices.

Using this PolitiFact logic, Trump "deserves credit" for "lowering premiums for Obamacare enrollees"... 10/

...even though 1) he was trying to do the exact opposite; 2) he had nothing to do w/#SilverLoading whatsoever; 3) he's being successfully sued in court by the insurance carriers for cutting off those payments; and 4) his own HHS Dept. tried to stop #SilverLoading for awhile. 11/

By PolitiFact's logic, if Trump tried to shoot me while I'm standing in front of an ATM, but he hit the ATM instead and it started spitting out $20 bills, I'm apparently supposed to praise him for "giving me free money" instead of having him arrested for attempted murder. /END

CORRECTION: In #10 above, that should read "in the form of reduced PREMIUMS", not "reduced SUBSIDIES"! Sorry for the confusion.

Hitler, 1932: "If elected, I promise not to kill all the Jews!"

PolitiFact, 1945: "There were 15 million Jews worldwide and Hitler only killed 6 million of them before being stopped by Allied forces, so #PromiseKept!"

I know that's a cheap shot, but as @sfmnemonic noted:

https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/896884949634232320