Cook: Cotton’s Credibility Questioned Twice By Fact-Checking Organization

Congressman Tom Cotton’s credibility has been called into question twice in the past week by the fact-checking organization Politifact.

In two separate rulings, Politifact rated both a public statement from Cotton and his recent TV commercial as “false.”

Cotton made a recent appearance on MSNBC where he proclaimed in the following statement that the new Obamacare website has no privacy protections:

“They realize that the websites aren’t ready, that there’s no privacy protections, that there’s likely to be data breaches,” Cotton said.

PolitiFact did a thorough review of Cotton’s assertion and proclaimed his charge as “false.”

From Politifact:

Our ruling
Cotton claimed that there are no privacy protections in the new online health care marketplaces. However, we found federal privacy regulations in the Affordable Care Act that keep the system’s data hub from storing user data.

The cybersecurity experts we spoke with said that the security precautions in place on healthcare.gov are at least as strong as secure e-commerce websites consumers are already accustomed to using. No one we spoke with raised concerns about privacy. The most relevant complaints we saw remain that the websites are slow, not that consumer information is vulnerable.

We rate Cotton’s statement False.

Flash forward to this week. PoltiFact issued another ruling where they proclaimed yet another Tom Cotton claim as being false.

This time, PolitiFact reviewed Cotton’s television commercial where he claimed Mark Pryor had voted for “special subsidies” for himself and Congressional staffers so they would be “protected from Obamacare.”

PolitiFact thoroughly reviewed the charges Cotton made against Senator Pryor and released the following ruling:

Our ruling
Cotton said Pryor voted for “special subsidies” for lawmakers and staff in congress “so they’re protected from Obamacare.” The subsidy referred to is the government continuing to share the cost of insurance premiums as is standard practice in every establishment that offers insurance to its workers. There is nothing special about that. The only thing special about Obamacare and Congress is that the law treated Congress and its workers differently than any other group of workers.

Cotton relies on an interpretation of the law that independent experts say is wrong.

The assertion falls wide of the facts, and we rate this claim False.

Tom Cotton has been in Congress for ten months and twice in one week’s time a national fact-checking organization has called him out for making false statements. I have never seen a freshman Congressman’s credibility shredded as much as Tom Cotton’s was this week.