Fox News' Bill Hemmer cited an unnamed report to continue the network's dishonest attacks on the Affordable Care Act by claiming that HealthCare.gov may cost taxpayers over $1 billion -- an assertion that overstated the actual cost by more than $700 million.
On the October 25 edition of Fox's America's Newsroom, host Hemmer asked whether HealthCare.gov, the website established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to connect Americans with health insurance exchanges, would be “the first billion-dollar website?” Hemmer then told contributor Katie Pavlich, “Government keeps throwing money after problems which shows you how government gets fat and very, very expensive,” before concluding, “These people have lost their minds.” The on-screen text read, “Rpt: Final Obamacare Website Costs Could Top $1 Billion.”
However, as reported in a Washington Post fact-check, yesterday's congressional hearings regarding the ACA website revealed that government contracts to create the website amounted to a total value of less than $300 million. According to The Washington Post:
In the testimony, a reference was made to the fact that the TCV (total contract value) was $292 million. That is the least important number, as in effect it is like a credit card limit. What is more important is what has been already spent or obligated.
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To sum up: The floor for spending on the Web site to date appears to be at least $170 million, with an upward potential of nearly $300 million.
While neither Hemmer nor Pavlich revealed the source of the report they were using to make their claims, a Media Matters search found only a Newsmax article with a similar contention. That article in turn referenced a report from Bloomberg Government. But according to Bloomberg, their study covered “all health law-related contract awards to the firms since the ACA was enacted in March 2010,” not just the those related to the ACA website. That study may also be overstating the costs, considering “it assumed that most recent IT awards by the Department of Health and Human Services are ACA-related because the law's implementation has consumed an increasing share of the department's time and resources.”
Fox is doubling down on misleading its viewers about the costs of the ACA -- almost literally. It was previously called out for inflating HealthCare.gov's costs to $634 million.