By Baird Helgeson
U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann told Sean Hannity on his Fox News Channel show last month that the House health care bill prohibits people from buying private health insurance after a certain date.
The folks at the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact have a response to that: liar, liar, "pants on fire."
Really, that's what they say.
Here's what the political fact-checking wing of the St. Petersburg Times concluded after it investigated her statement:
"Bachmann isn't just guilty of misinterpreting the language from one page of the bill. She's taken that misinterpretation to a ridiculous extreme -- the claim that no private insurance could be sold after a certain date," PolitiFact states. "That ignores the central tenet of a plan that's been discussed for months -- that the plan would rely on a marketplace of private insurance."
PolitiFact's reporters and editors devised six classifications for statements they review, ranging from true to false to "pants on fire."
They ranked Bachmann's recent statement as "pants on fire."
