Jack Kelly Sunday

A message to my friends at the Post-Gazette:

This is how you fact-check Jack Kelly.

In today's column on the "cost" of ObamaCare, Jack writes:

The Congressional Budget Office estimated a loss of 800,000 jobs over 10 years.

Luckily for you, me, Jack and everyone else, the Washington Post fact-checked this more than two years ago.

Here's how they set up the checking:

A long and rather dry discussion of nation's budget outlook at the House Budget Committee has exploded with a frenzy of politics after a brief exchange, highlighted in the video clip above, between Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) and Congressional Budget Office director Douglas W. Elmendorf. The CBO last August had estimated that the new health care law over the next decade would reduce the number of overall workers in the United States by one-half of one percent, and Campbell got Elmendorf to utter the words "800,000."

And the facts:

The CBO first discussed this issue, briefly, in a budget analysis last August. Boiled down to plain English, the CBO is essentially saying that some people who are now in the work force because they need health insurance would decide to stop working because the health care law guaranteed they would have access to health care.

Think of someone who is 63, a couple of years before retirement, who is still in a job only because they are waiting to get on Medicare when they turn 65. Or a single mother with children who is only working to make sure her kids have health insurance.

And yet this debunked factoid shows up in a Jack Kelly column about how ObamaCare is going to cost the president's "young supporters."

Huh?

To my friends at the Post-Gazette: THIS IS HOW YOU FACT-CHECK JACK KELLY.