Sioux Falls, SD – South Dakota Democratic Party Executive Directror Zach Crago is calling on the Rounds campaign, TV stations, and radio stations to pull his campaign’s Medicare ad that the Pulitzer Prize winning fact checker Politifact called inaccurate.
“Mike Rounds is peddling a recycled and often rebuked lie to scare South Dakota seniors,” says Crago. “These Washington scare tactics have no rightful place in South Dakota. That’s why I’m calling on Mike Rounds and all the TV and radio stations running his deceitful commercial to pull his ad immediately.”
“As an insurance salesman, Rounds should know better and, frankly, be ashamed,” says Crago. “KELO has caught his campaign in a blatant fabrication, and Mike Rounds owes South Dakota seniors an apology. This was an intentional mischaracterization made for political purposes.”
After Mike Rounds started running an ad claiming that $700 billion is being stolen from Medicare to fund Obamacare, Keloland’s Perry Groton fact checked the ad with Pulitzer Prize winning organization Politifact. Politifact reporter Joshua Gillen said, “We just really don’t find this one all that true.”
From the Keloland report:
PolitiFact says the claim isn’t accurate because the $700 billion doesn’t come from the traditional Medicare program itself. Instead, it’s a reduction in payments to insurance companies through the privately-managed Medicare plan called Medicare Advantage.
“The idea behind that is that the Affordable Care Act is trying to reduce the amount of payments that are going to Medicare Advantage plans because they are reimbursed at a higher rate by the government than actual Medicare is,” Gillin said. Gillin says far from losing hundreds of billions of dollars, Medicare spending will actually increase as more Baby Boomers become eligible in the years to come.
The Mike Rounds ad comes on the heels of a number of truth-bending ad flubs. Rounds’ first TV ad about “the South Dakota Way” was pulled by the campaign after Rounds used stock photos with at least one image of a model in Paris, France. Instead of accepting the mistake, they then tried convincing reporters that ad was never meant for TV – even though they sent out a release titled “Check out my new TV ad.”
Oops! We could not locate your form.