Just a few days before the Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton criticized her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders’ plan to implement a single-payer health care system in America, so it would probably have been newsworthy if Clinton had then promised to implement just such a system during her Iowa victory speech.
Of course, that never made the news because Clinton never said it … but that didn’t stop Glenn Beck from “reporting” that she had on his television program last night.
“Last night, she said she would achieve a single-payer health care system,” Beck stated. “Just four years ago, they were all saying that was a conspiracy theory, that there’s no way any of them wanted a single-payer health care system. But apparently, Obamacare is exactly what we warned it would be: a system designed to crush the health care system and give the government an excuse to swoop in and implement a single-payer health care system. But who’s the kook? Who’s the crazy one? Who’s the conspiracy theorist? Me? You? Or perhaps has the media and the left been lying to you the whole time?”
Beck repeated this claim on his radio program today, which utterly surprised his co-hosts, who could not imagine how they had not heard this piece of news, while Beck insisted that “he was pretty darn sure” it was true because “it was in my morning briefing.”
After admitting that he had not actually heard Clinton say this, Beck had his staff try to find any evidence the Clinton had made statement — after, of course, he’d already reported it on television the night before — but they came up empty, which was very confusing to Beck because he was sure that he had seen it in his briefing “and I don’t think I misunderstood that.”
This is another pretty telling example of how Beck “verifies” information before he goes out and reports it as fact on air: He simply doesn’t bother.
UPDATE: Later in the radio broadcast, Beck reported that Clinton actually promised “universal health care for every single payer,” which he insisted was essentially the same thing as single-payer health care. He’s still wrong, as what Clinton actually said was that “I know that we can finish the job of universal health-care coverage for every single man, woman and child.”
