Topic: CNSNews.com
In a Jan. 31 CNSNews.com article, Matt Cover wrote: "In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year."
That's not true at all. FactCheck.org points out that "the IRS made no such declaration about the future cost of health insurance plans":
Beginning in 2014, individuals and families purchasing health insurance on their own will be able to shop for insurance in new state- or federal-run health care exchanges. Qualified health plans offered through the exchanges will provide four basic levels of coverage (bronze, silver, gold and platinum), with the bronze-level plan being the lowest tier of acceptable coverage.
But the headline of the Cybercast News Service report simply jumps to the conclusion that the IRS said that the “Cheapest Obamacare Plan Will Be $20,000 Per Family,” when there was no indication that that was the case. An opinion piece published on LifeNews.com made the same leap, claiming that “the IRS … has finally released a cost analysis based on ObamaCare regulations showing that the cheapest healthcare plan in 2016 will cost average American families of four or five members $20,000 per year for the so-called ‘bronze plan.’ ”
For one thing, the example in the proposed regulations uses the word “average,” which means that the “cheapest” plan could, in fact, be lower than $20,000. But more important, the regulations weren’t a “cost analysis” at all. A spokesperson for the Treasury Department confirmed to FactCheck.org in an email that the IRS wasn’t making any declarations or projections about what prices will be.
“[Twenty thousand dollars] is a round number used by IRS for a hypothetical example,” the official wrote. “It is not an estimate of premiums for a bronze plan for a family of five in 2016.”
Will CNS issue a correction? Don't count on it.
Cover has a notable history of false and misleading claims in his CNS work, the most notorious being his untrue insistence that onetime TSA nominee Erroll Southers was claiming that some domestic terrorists have a "Christian identity." In fact, Southers was referring to the far-right extremist movement known as Christian Identity. CNS never bothered to correct that, either.
