The Plum LineGreg Sargent's blog
Posted at 08/17/2009, 10:16 AM EST
House GOP Leader Vows To Stop Spreading Health Care Falsehood After Local Paper Busts Him
GOP Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri has promised to stop spreading a health care falsehood that’s been widely bandied about on the right after his local paper fact-checked his claim and called him out for fibbing.
Blunt claimed to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he wouldn’t be able to get his hip replaced in countries with socialized medicine, prompting the paper to respond aggressively in an editorial:
http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-platform/published-editorials/2009/08/truth-and-not-quite-truth-in-the-health-reform-debate/ Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Springfield, knows a thing or two about health care. But some of what he knows just isn’t true.
“I’m 59,” Mr. Blunt said last week during a meeting with Post-Dispatch reporters and editors. “In either Canada or Great Britain, if I broke my hip, I couldn’t get it replaced.”
We fact-checked that. At least 63 percent of hip replacements performed in Canada last year and two-thirds of those done in England were on patients age 65 or older. More than 1,200 in Canada were done on people older than 85.
In a subsequent conversation with the paper, Blunt claimed: “I’m glad you pointed that out to me. I won’t use that example any more.”
The kicker: Blunt, as it happens, is the head of the House GOP Health Care Solutions Group, something Dems are likely to seize on in the context of his new admission of, er, error.
more:
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/political-media/house-gop-leader-vows-to-stop-spreading-health-care-falsehood-after-local-paper-busts-him/
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