Dean Heller spins some tall tales for his hometown friends

I've always liked Dean Heller. We might disagree politically, but my interactions with him have always been friendly. He seems like a truly nice person, the opposite of the what we see in some other Nevada politicians.

But watching him this week at the NNDA breakfast reminded me that Dean's ambition is clearly more important than adherence to truth.

You see, Dean used to come off as a lot more moderate than he does today. As assemblyman and Secretary of State, he championed causes that don't exactly line up with the national GOP's ideology.

But once he decided to run for Congress, he rebranded himself as a "true conservative" and is holding tight to the party line.

One of the difficulties of adopting another ideology is that it's tough to keep the facts straight.

Here are some video clips I shot of Heller at the NNDA breakfast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vpOaLqm4ds

The first whopper is pretty funny, that Heller thinks Barack Obama was "born and raised in Chicago." I guess that's better than claiming he was born in Kenya.

Then there is the clip where Heller claims that 18-year olds who don't buy their own health insurance are going to be arrested and put in jail under the new health care reform legislation. This actually highlights a little-known aspect of this new law that Heller doesn't even know, despite his claims to have gone over this "line by line."

What he missed was this:

"Non-compliance with the personal responsibility requirement to have health coverage is not subject to criminal or civil penalties under the Code and interest does not accrue for failure to pay such assessments in a timely manner."

Yes, that's right. Despite all the talk about being forced to buy health insurance, there is no provision for enforcing this mandate. So if you really don't want to buy insurance, the cops aren't going to drag you off to jail.

This brings us to the next clip, where Heller passes on the lie that the IRS will be hiring 16,500 new agents to enforce this law. Ezra Klein has the best deconstruction of how this bit of misinformation came into being. Basically, the GOP members of the House Ways & Means committee (of which Heller is a member) used some very creative accounting to make this claim, which FactCheck.org calls "wildly inaccurate."

The next Heller claim is even grander. He claims the Congressional Budget Office says the health care bill will cost $3 trillion. But the CBO report says no such thing. What the CBO report says is the reform bill will have a net savings of $143 billion for Uncle Sam.

I did find an article on FoxNews.com that seems to be the basis for this claim, but of course, Fox News is hardly the Congressional Budget Office. And the reasoning behind this estimate is full of holes. Basically, the author adds up all the costs, and leaves out the savings the legislation creates.

It says that Americans will spend $1.5 trillion on mandated health insurance, and adds that to the cost of the legislation. There are two problems with this. One, that in the way Heller was using the figure, he was insinuating that the $3 trillion was tax money being spent.

And two, this figure double counts many of these dollars. Some of that $1.5 trillion comes from government subsidies that the author counts as part of the $3 trillion total. It also doesn't consider the savings to those people who will have their medical cost covered under insurance, instead of paying directly. In other words, this $3 trillion cost figure is a fabrication.

The last disputed claim Heller makes is that the car dealers on South Carson Street will have to spend an extra $100,000 each per year for health care, and that some casino owner he talked to said it will cost him $7 million per year.

This claim seems to be tied to the provision that businesses with more than 50 full-time employees will have to start offering health insurance or pay a penalty ($2,000 per year, per uninsured worker), starting in 2014.

You can actually see where Heller gets his creative accounting from here. He's assuming that each of these car dealers have 50 uninsured employees, and the penalties would add up to $100,000 per year. Of course, what he doesn't consider is that many of these employees already have insurance. He also skips over the savings that companies with less than 100 employees can achieve through the insurance exchanges being set up, or the tax credits for companies with less than 25 employees.

There were other whoppers to be sure, such as this common GOP insinuation that Obama is responsible for the "bank bailout," when that happened before he was president, and was the idea of then-Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen.

But there were also things Heller said that I agreed with. He supports the re-importation of drugs, and his idea for letting doctors write of indigent care as bad debt sounds good also. And his assertion that Obama gave the insurance companies everything they wanted in this bill does ring pretty true.

You have to expect a little political spin when listening to any member of Congress. But, to quote late Sen. Patrick Moynihan, "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own set of facts."

There are plenty of valid points to argue against this new health reform law. Heller and his GOP buddies shouldn't have to make stuff up like this. It seems they've caught Bush-itis, a detachment from reality where truth doesn't matter anymore.

I'm sorry, but truth does matter. It destroys the public's confidence when our elected leaders play fast and loose with the facts like this. We should be able to have an honest debate about the important issues in this country. But then some idiot comes along and starts making stuff up in order to get air time on TV, and then we wonder why we hate politicians.

We don't hate you yet, Dean, but you might want to think back to those rural values you tout, and try using the truth next time.