The Washington Post Keeps Publishing False Claims About Medicare for All
The newspaper continues to spread a lie about Bernie Sanders's Medicare-for-All plan — despite its own fact checker admitting it's wrong.
The Washington Post building in Washington, D.C., June 9, 2011.Daniel X. O’Neil / Wikimedia
An activist organization asked me to speak on their conference call last night about the Mercatus Medicare-for-All study. After I finished my opening remarks, one of the callers, a retired physician, told me that she had read Sanders’s plan would cut payments to doctors by 40 percent in the Washington Post. I told her that the Post had already corrected that mistake, but now I realize the Post continues to disseminate this falsehood in new pieces across its website despite already issuing a correction on it.
The False Claim
The originator of this false claim in the Washington Post universe was, ironically enough, fact-checker Glenn Kessler. Kessler wrote on August 7 that:
In doing his research, Blahous decided to follow the text of the Sanders plan and assume that providers — doctors, hospitals, drug companies and the like — would face an immediate cut of 40 percent in their payments.
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