PolitiFact: The Roundup

The fact check then moves on to a panel of veteran editors who debate the statement and the reporter’s recommended Truth-O-Meter ruling. The panel votes on a final ruling; majority prevails.

National issues, including the crisis in the Department of Veterans Affairs’ hospitals, the dilemma about raising the debt ceiling and the future of Medicare kept PolitiFact busy last week.

We also did a deep dive into the numbers to look at the public’s interest in early voting.

With the primary runoffs weeks away and the general election in November, it’s a busy season here at PolitiFact. We’re scouring candidate fliers, press releases and debates, looking for worthy fact checks. But also let us know if you hear something that makes you wonder: Could that be true? We’ll dig up the facts.

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Republican congressional hopeful Mike Collins: Says he never wanted to raise the debt ceiling.

Mike Collins, a candidate in the 10th Congressional District, told Roll Call in a 15-second news clip his thoughts about the proposed debt-ceiling increase that Congress approved in February.

“I think we need to raise the debt ceiling at a certain point that we can get business done and start working on a budget to start paying that down and get this economy back rolling,” he said.

A few days before the May 20 Republican primary, Collins put out a flier in which he said he “has never said he wanted to raise the debt ceiling.”

Collins, who faces Jody Hice in the GOP runoffs in July, said in a telephone interview with us that he never said he wanted to raise the debt ceiling.

“The debt ceiling was going up whether or not I wanted it to,” he said. “Did I want to (raise the debt ceiling)? No. We have to have a plan to start bringing it down.”

Collins explained in more detail a few days later via email. The candidate said he was not in favor of the legislation that passed to raise the debt ceiling in February. Collins said he would only support a debt-ceiling increase with “deep spending concessions and a path to pay the debt down.”

We understand that Collins might not have meant what he said. But his opponents have a point in that he did say it.

We believe Collins is somewhat accurate, but the claim in his flier omits some critical facts. We rated his claim as Mostly False.

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Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp: “The numbers make it clear that Georgia voters are increasingly taking advantage of early voting opportunities.”

Georgia’s had early voting now for about a decade, and Kemp said in a statement just before the May 20 primaries that it’s increasingly popular with voters.

Kemp was specifically comparing early voting from the primaries in 2010 (at 19 percent) with 2014 (at 24.2 percent), Kemp spokesman Jared Thomas said.

In the May primaries, more than 239,000 voters went to the polls in advance of Election Day to cast ballots for U.S. senator, governor, and a long list of state and local officeholders. An additional 772,643 followed on Election Day.

Midterm elections, which usually have the governor’s race as a headliner, and the presidential contests are quite different and have to be looked at separately for an apples-to-apples comparison. In presidential years, early votes accounted for about 13 percent in 2004, 53 percent in 2008 and 49 percent in 2012. In the last midterms in 2006, early votes made up 17 percent of the total vote. In 2010, they accounted for 29 percent.

The numbers support Kemp.

We rated his statement as True. ‘

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U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.: Medicare is “going broke. The trust fund goes bankrupt in 2026.”

We’ve long heard that the nation’s largest health insurance program faces future trouble as health care expenditures continue to rise and the baby boom generation continues to gray.

Indeed, retirees can expect to receive $3 in Medicare benefits for every $1 they paid in Medicare taxes.

But is the program really headed for the rocks?

To back the claim he made at a forum, Ryan cited four excerpts from the latest annual report of the Medicare trustees, published in May 2013. The excerpts address the trust fund for Part A, which is a common way — albeit an incomplete one — of measuring Medicare’s overall financial health.

The trust fund for Medicare Part A (primarily hospitals) is projected to be exhausted in 2026, but that doesn’t mean the program would be bankrupt or stop operating.

Part A would continue to receive revenue and continue to operate, albeit at a reduced level, if Congress doesn’t make any changes in Medicare — even though, since 1970, Congress has always made changes to keep the trust fund solvent. Meanwhile, there is no projection that the other parts of Medicare will run out of money.

We rated Ryan’s statement as Mostly False.

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U.S. Rep. David Scott, D-Atlanta: “We’ve got an average of 5,600 soldiers committing suicide. That’s about 20 a day.”

Scott was talking recently to WABE radio about the ongoing scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs, in which lengthy delays for treatments appears to have been covered up and may have contributed to veterans’ deaths. He based his comments about suicides in part on a 2013 VA study that calculated that 22 veterans die each day by their own hands.

That study was the most extensive ever taken and included state reports where death certificates listed the deceased veteran status. There was no proof that these deaths were by veterans who had tried to or had accessed VA care.

We think this context was important to linking the number of suicides to the current scandal. We rated Scott’s statement as Half True.