Statement: I helped write" the Affordable Care Act.
Speaker: bernie sanders
About the speaker: Bernie Sanders is a senator from Vermont. Sanders was first elected to the Senate in 2007 and was re-elected in 2012 and 2018. The senator also ran an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2016, losing the Democratic primary to Hillary Clinton. From 1991 until 2007, he was the representative of Vermont’s At-Large District of the House of Representatives. Sanders was the mayor of Burlington from 1981 to 1989. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago. In 2019, he announced he was running for the Democratic nomination for president and dropped out in April 2020.
Date: January 17, 2016
Location: national
Topics: corrections and updates;health care
Context: comments during the South Carolina Democratic presidential debate
Fact-check justification: Sanders said he "helped write" the Affordable Care Act. He deserves credit for one provision of it -- worth a not-insignificant $11 billion. But overall, he was hardly an inside crafter of the bill. Until his effort was blocked by a GOP procedural move, Sanders supported a more aggressive single-payer system, and multiple news articles quoted him as being undecided about supporting the main Democratic bill until late in the process. Sanders’ statement contains an element of  but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. That meets our definition of . UPDATE, March 28, 2016: After we published our story, Sanders’ staff provided PolitiFact with several additional examples of provisions the senator helped insert into the Affordable Care Act, sometimes with the cooperation of other lawmakers. According to his staff, these include $1.5 billion in mandatory spending for the National Health Service Corps , a negotiated rule-making process to redefine the criteria for designating medically underserved areas, a waiver for states that want to experiment on health care policy, a provision to double penalties for health care fraud , a provision strengthening the  Claims Act , language to make volunteer ambulance personnel and firefighters who perform emergency medical services eligible for grants and loans, a provision to ease payments to alternative medicine practitioners , higher funding levels for the Public Health and Prevention Fund, and a formula increase in Medicaid funding that benefited his home state of Vermont.  While this list does provide a more detailed picture of Sanders’ role in the bill’s crafting, none of these provisions involve core elements of the law, such as the exchanges and subsidies, the individual and employer mandates, the Medicaid expansion, the tax changes, the essential benefits package, and the provisions on cost containment. We stand by our original conclusion that, despite making contributions to the final legislation, Sanders was, for most of the process, an outsider pushing for a more aggressive single-payer system rather than an insider negotiating and crafting the final design of the bill. While saying that he "helped write" the Affordable Care Act contains an element of , Sanders ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. So we still rate his  .