Fact-checking Ben Carson, Tom Cotton and Adam Putnam: PolitiFact covers the conventions
By Louis Jacobson, PolitiFact senior correspondent
INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — Florida delegates once again heard speeches from prominent Republicans at their delegate breakfast on July 19, including former presidential candidate Ben Carson, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and state Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam. PolitiFact checked some of their remarks for accuracy.
Carson said that in the United States, “we have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. That doesn’t make any sense.”
It may not make any sense, but he’s pretty close on the facts. As we noted in 2014, the United States actually has 4.4 percent of the world’s population and 22 percent of its prisoners.
Carson also said that “it is cheaper to buy heroin than it is to buy cigarettes in some places in this country.”
We haven’t checked this assertion directly, but we found news reports suggesting that it is broadly accurate, though there is some variation regionally.
In 2015, the Washington Post reported on various efforts to research this question and found that in many places in the United States, a single-dose bag of heroin costs between $5.00 and $10.00, a price kept low by large supplies from Mexican cartels. That range happens to be the same as the range for a pack of cigarettes, with state-by-state differences emerging largely due to variations in how much tax states decide to place on cigarettes.
Carson took aim at Democratic health care policies, saying that there’s enough excess spending on health care to be able to implement a different approach.
“We pay almost twice as much per capita for health care in this country as many other countries which have much better access,” he said. “That means there’s an enormous amount of inefficiency.”
Because Carson said “many other countries,” his comment is more accurate than some of the other politicians we’ve have checked in the past.
We have written that the United States spends more on health care per capita than other countries do, but it’s not always twice as much.
According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, U.S. health care spending was $8,713 per capita in 2013. Switzerland and Norway came in second and third at $6,325 and $5,862 per capita, respectively. But average per capita spending was less than $3,500 across the 32 countries listed in the OECD database. That’s 40 percent of what the United States spends per person.
Carson’s least accurate statement was that “when Obama first got into office, it didn’t matter that we were falling off the cliff economically. He had to get the health care (bill) passed.”
In reality, Obama got started on an economic stimulus bill — directly designed to target economic problems from the recession — before he was even sworn in. He released a blueprint for a stimulus bill on Jan. 10, 2009. The bill that emerged from Congress was enacted on Feb. 17, 2009, less than a month after his inauguration.
This meant that the stimulus had long been completed by the time the Obama administration began working on a health care bill in earnest.
The other headliner at the breakfast was Cotton, the Arkansas senator.
Like Carson, Cotton took a shot at Obama’s signature health care bill, the Affordable Care Act. “Everything we said about that law seven years ago has come true,” Cotton said. “Millions of people have lost their health insurance. Millions have seen their premiums go up.”
This is an exaggeration. On the one hand, it’s true that many people, perhaps in the low millions, saw their insurance plan disappear because their insurer decided to get rid of their plan rather than change it to conform with the new law. Many of these people did eventually find replacement insurance.
At the same time, though, the law also allowed many Americans — probably a larger number, in fact — to secure insurance for the first time. Earlier this year, we noted that the law had enabled some 17 million Americans to get insurance for the first time, either in the online marketplaces or by obtaining Medicaid coverage through the law’s expansion of that low-income health insurance program.
Finally, the event’s host, Putnam, closed out the proceedings with some comments of his own.
Putnam, an early frontrunner for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2018, said, “The unfunded pension liability in Illinois is bigger than the Florida budget. And the Florida budget is half the size of the New York budget.”
He’s right on both points.
We found apples-to-apples data on the two states’ 2014 budgets. New York’s budget was the nation’s second-biggest at $137.5 billion. Florida ranked fifth at $68 billion. That’s almost exactly twice as much. And since the two states are now similar in population, that comparison doesn’t change much if you look at spending on a per-capita basis.
Meanwhile, in 2015, an Illinois legislative commission pegged the size of the state’s unfunded pension liability as $111 billion. That’s much larger than Florida’s annual budget.
Louis Jacobson is covering the 2016 Republican and Democratic national conventions for PolitiFact on Medium as part of a grant from the Knight Foundation.
