Facts were sometimes used as blunt instruments as the four remaining GOP presidential candidates hammered away at each other in the last debate before Saturday’s South Carolina primary.
- Santorum and Romney tangled on the Massachusetts health care law. Santorum wrongly claimed it was a “government-run” program. Romney erred when he said everybody was covered by private insurance, ignoring Medicare and his own expansion of Medicaid.
- Santorum also fouled up when he claimed the state has “the highest health insurance premiums of any state in the country.” Seven states and Washington, D.C., were higher in 2010, the most recent year for which figures are available.
- Gingrich claimed Romney appointees “funded” an abortion clinic. The truth is that an autonomous state agency approved a tax-exempt loan — not direct taxpayer funding — and Romney said he wasn’t aware until after he left office.
- Gingrich, slamming Jimmy Carter, said “unemployment went to 10.8 percent.” It did — nearly two years after Ronald Reagan took office. But it never exceeded 7.8 percent under Carter.
- Gingrich claimed that “none” of the ideas on the website of his Center for Health Transformation resemble Obama’s program. Actually, we found a call there for an individual mandate, which Gingrich himself repeated as recently as last May.
- Romney slammed Gingrich’s claim to have “helped” Reagan create jobs, saying Reagan mentioned Gingrich only once in his published diaries. That’s true. Reagan wrote that the young congressman’s 1983 suggestion to freeze spending “would cripple our defense program,” and he rejected it.
- Ron Paul, a physician, claimed medicine “worked rather well” in the early 1960′s. That was before Medicare, when in fact rising health care costs were forcing many of the elderly onto public assistance or charity care.
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