Rep. Dan Benishek’s (R-MI) embrace of the Republican Party’s platform ran into stiff opposition at a town hall meeting in Saulte Sainte Marie, Michigan when at least a dozen constituents, many of them senior citizens, pushed back against Benishek’s claims on Medicare, Social Security, oil subsides and health care reform.

Benishek couldn’t even get through his opening remarks before attendees began criticizing his support for Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposed budget that would increase the cost of health care for seniors by providing “premium support” vouchers to eligible senior citizens.

“If you have a better idea as how to keep Medicare sustainable over the long term, I’d be happy to hear it,” offered Benishek.

He may have regretted those words after the event, because for half an hour, Benishek fielded several suggestions on how to increase funding for Medicare, ranging from ending oil subsidies to increasing taxes on the wealthiest two percent, suggestions that Benishek summarily dismissed.

Benishek also displayed a shocking lack of self-awareness about his level of knowledge of some key facts. “There are no government subsidies for oil,” he told one woman who suggested ending the very real subsidies given to oil corporations to help defray the cost of Medicare. Watch a portion of the town hall:

At one point, the discussion turned to health care reform. Benishek, who served as a medical doctor before he was elected to Congress in 2010, was thrust onto the national stage after his predecessor Bart Stupak cast the deciding vote in favor of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. He told the audience that the United States has the best health care system in the world, before he was literally laughed at by several attendees.

“We have the highest life spans in the world,” argued Benishek. Several women in the audience quickly pointed out that in fact, many countries with universal health care place higher than the United States in terms of life expectancy, including Canada, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. The United States ranks 50th, just behind South Korea and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I don’t believe that’s true,” said Benishek. “How can you not know that, you’re a medical doctor?” one woman replied.

The confrontational town hall meeting almost didn’t even happen, after a member of the public, armed with a camera, refused to stop recording. A representative from the Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored the event, threatened to shut down the entire proceedings.

The number of teen births in the U.S. dropped again in 2010, according to a government report, with nearly every state seeing a decrease. Nationally, the rate fell 9 percent to about 34 per 1,000 girls ages 15 through 19, and the drop was seen among all racial and ethnic groups. Mississippi continues to have the highest teen birth rate, with 55 births per 1,000 girls. New Hampshire has the lowest rate at just under 16 births per 1,000 girls.

This is the lowest national rate for teen births since the Centers for Disease Control began tracking it in 1940, and CDC officials attributed the decline to pregnancy prevention efforts. Other reports show that teenagers are having less sex and using contraception more often. Studies have backed this up. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle found that teenagers who received some type of comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to get pregnant or get someone else pregnant. And in 2007, a federal report showed that abstinence-only programs had “no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence.”

But 37 states require sex education that includes abstinence, 26 of which require that abstinence be stressed as the best method. Additionally, research shows that abstinence-only strategies could deter contraceptive use among teenagers, thus increasing their risk of unintended pregnancy.

For example, take the states with the highest and lowest teen pregnancy rates. Mississippi does not require sex education in schools, but when it is taught, abstinence-only education is the state standard. New Mexico, which has the second highest teen birth rate, does not require sex ed and has no requirements on what should be included when it is taught. New Hampshire, on the other hand, requires comprehensive sex education in schools that includes abstinence and information about condoms and contraception.

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) has a new editorial in this morning’s USA Today condemning the Affordable Care Act’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending, as a rationing body that will drive a “wedge between physicians and their patients.” The claim has been repeatedly debunked by fact checking organizations and this website, but Gingrey goes a step further, suggesting that the “IPAB board members aren’t required to be doctors, or have any medical experience at all”:

In fact, the health care law even gives IPAB the authority to operate in secret and accept unlimited donations of services or even property from lobbyists. Cash, meals, cars, vacations and even homes will all be fair game under the current law. The potential for corruption is limitless.

The law itself says otherwise. Flip to Sec. 3403, page 423 of the Affordable Care Act and you’ll find that not only are some of the members physicians — appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate — but that they’re also held by the ethics standards established in the Ethics in Government Act of 1978:

Given Gingrey’s history of misstatements and outright lies, these most recent claims are just part of the way he operates. What’s more troubling is that USA Today continues to print his screeds, no questions asked.

George W. Bush’s Social Security privatization guru Charles Blahous — who now works for the Koch-funded Mercatus Center — is out with a new report alleging that the Affordable Care Act adds $340 billion to the deficit. The new math relies on the old “double counting” meme — an argument advanced by Republicans in Congress in the final days of the health care reform debate alleging that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) appropriated the same revenue for extending the solvency of the Medicare trust fund as it did for paying out benefits. The Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery explains:

“Does the health-care act worsen the deficit? The answer, I think, is clearly that it does,” Blahous, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, said in an interview. “If one asserts that this law extends the solvency of Medicare, then one is affirming that this law adds to the deficit. Because the expansion of the Medicare trust fund and the creation of the new subsidies together create more spending than existed under prior law.” [...]

Medicare is financed in part through a trust fund that receives revenue from payroll taxes. Before Obama’s health-care act passed, the trust fund was projected to be drained by 2017 (later updated to 2016). Absent the health-care law, Blahous writes, Medicare would have been forced to enact a sharp reduction in benefit payments in the middle of this decade, or “other Medicare savings would have had to be found.”

Enter the health-care law, which provides about $575 billion in Medicare savings — enough to automatically extend the life of the trust fund through 2029, according to estimates at the time, and avoid a sharp cut in benefits. But in cost estimates by the nonpartisan CBO, those savings also offset a dramatic expansion of Medicaid under the law, as well as new subsidies for uninsured people to purchase coverage.

What Blahous calls “double counting” is actually the “unified budget process,” an accounting method that considers the spending and revenues of the entire federal budget over a 10 year period and the way Congress keeps track of its dollars. It’s the same math that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) relied on to conclude in 2010 that the law “would produce a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion over the 2010–2019 period as result of changes in direct spending and revenues.” Earlier this week, the CBO updated its estimate, reporting that the Affordable Care Act is expected to cost $50 billion less than they anticipated and Medicare actuaries reported that as a result of the savings in the law, the life of Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) Fund is extended to 2024, instead of in 2016.

Here is how the accounting process works: revenue or savings from the law enters the general fund of the federal treasury, where it is counted towards deficit reduction. The money is credited to the Medicare trust fund, which receives a treasury security that will be paid out in interest when necessary. Should the trust fund cash in its bond, that money is transferred from the general treasury to the fund. However, since the same revenue cannot be used to reduce the deficit and extend the life of the trust fund, Treasury would have to find that money somewhere else. But, given the principles of unified accounting, that money is said to reduce the deficit and extend the life of the fund.

As Jonathan Blum, the director of the Center for Medicare Management for CMS, explains, “I think it’s been a historical, and longstanding budget convention that when you have less dollars paid to the Medicare program to pay for benefits, there are dollars that accrue to the overall federal treasury, that can be spent for other purposes. And this is an OMB, CBO budget convention.”

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