In Florida candidates are fighting back against
misleading attack ads. Two-term Democrat Senator Bill Nelson decided that he didn’t need to put up with an ad that
suggests that Nelson’s 2010 vote for the health care law will end up cutting
Medicare with $500 billion of cuts.
His attorney, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern
District of Florida Kendall Coffey, issued a letter to stations showing the ads
explaining that these ads are blatantly untrue.
Media, Coffey suggests, has "a duty to protect the public from the
spread of false information and deliberate deception."
The health care law, in fact, will not reduce overall
medicare spending. In fact, the
Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicare funding will increase
rather than decrease, from $560 billion this year to $1.04 trillion in
2022.
The only truth to the ads at all is that the bill
assumes that the growth of future spending will be slower than in past decades,
resulting in savings of about $500 billion through increasing efficiency in the
program. However, Republicans have
labeled the changes as cuts in order to help recapture the legislature.
Several stations have rejected the letter from Coffey,
and will continue to air the ads.
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