Nearly every word of President Donald Trump’s first address to Congress was true, according to The New York Times fact check.
Reporters from the NYT sourced through each statement the president made in Tuesday night’s speech, which touched on: violent crime, immigration, border control, health care reform, labor, and energy. While the NYT labeled Trump’s comments as true, it did hedge heavily a few times, expressing reticence to call the president’s statements “true.”
For instance, the president addressed the rise in violent crime in the nation. Trump said the “murder rate in 2015 experienced its largest single-year increase in nearly half a century.” There were an estimated 15,696 murders in the U.S. in 2015, a 10 percent increase from 2014. The NYT concedes that fact, but it includes a caveat, labeling the president’s statement as “true, but somewhat misleading.”
The president’s statement is misleading because crime has been “falling for a generation,” the NYT reports. “In 1991, the F.B.I. estimated that there were 24,703 murders.” The president, however, was not addressing the fluctuations in crime rates in a general sense. His comments were specifically in reference to 2015’s murder rate, and not aimed at the overall trend in crime.
The NYT also labeled the president’s statement that “Obamacare is collapsing,” as “an exaggeration.” To claim the president’s statement as an exaggeration is interesting when held up against the research and data available on Obamacare.
Since Obamacare came into effect in 2014, some 16 of the 23 federally funded co-op health plans instituted by Obamacare have collapsed. Just seven of the original 23 remain, and those are losing money rapidly. Losses incurred by these seven co-ops alone cost the American taxpayer $1.7 billion, according to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
States are self-reporting the feeble state of the Obamacare exchanges. The Tennessee health commissioner even uses similar terminology as the president to describe the state of the exchanges in her state, calling them “very near collapse.” On the whole, state-run Obamacare exchanges are predicted to run insolvent, and completely collapse within a decade, according to a House report. Circumstances are so dire in some states that federal Medicaid money is being misused to keep exchanges solvent.
The Obama administration reported in October of last year that premiums will increase at an average of 25 percent across the 39 states serviced by the online marketplace healthcare.gov, according to the Obama administration. Even worse, around 20 percent of consumers, or one in five, will only have one insurer to choose from in the marketplace.
The newspaper even went so far as to paraphrase the president specifically to avoid the phrase, “illegal immigrants.” The NYT instead paraphrases the president: “Families of people killed by undocumented immigrants have been ‘ignored by our media.’”
The full Times fact check is available here.
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