PoltiFactoid

Jon Chait has an exceptionally smart column on PolitFact's bizarre choice to label the claim that the Paul Ryan budget would effectively kill Medicare as the "Lie of the Year."

The money quote

Is that [the Ryan plan] “ending Medicare?” Well, it’s a matter of opinion. At some point, a change is dramatic enough that it is clearly ending the program. If you proposed to replace Medicare with a plan to give everybody two free aspirin on their 65th birthday, I would hope Politfact would concede that this would be “ending Medicare,” even if you call the free aspirin “Medicare. . . .”

Does the Republican plan indeed end Medicare? I would argue yes. But it’s obviously a question of interpretation, not fact. And the whole problem with Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” is that it doesn’t grasp this distinction. Politifact doesn’t even seem to understand the criteria for judging whether a claim is a question of opinion or a question of fact, let alone whether it is true.

Matt Yglesias makes a similar point.

House Republicans voted to replace Medicare's existing single payer fee for service program with a different program, also called "Medicare," under which (in the words of Politifact) retirees "would receive 'premium support payments' from the government to help pay for the private insurance." Whether or not this change should be described with "harsh" terms is clearly a matter of ethical judgment. But it's obviously a big change. Mitt Romney, for example, lauded the plan as reflecting "the need to fundamentally transform Medicare." If friends of the plan describe it as fundamentally transforming the program, can it really be wildly illegitimate for its foes to describe it as ending Medicare? . . . This is a hair-splitting disagreement, not a gaping void of factual error and deliberate deception.