Bernie Sanders Told Blatant Lie at New Hampshire Debate, and CNN’s Fact-Checker Missed It

Independent Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders told a whopper about former Vice President Joe Biden’s health care plan at Friday night’s Democratic debate, and CNN’s fact-checker completely missed it.

CNN published a fact-checking article on Friday night’s ABC News Democratic presidential debate that gave the candidates a mostly-clean bill of health, citing two statements that were “misleading” or “exaggerations,” but found the bulk of their statements to be true or slightly deficient of context.

They did cite Sanders for “exaggerating” by saying that the U.S. spends “twice as much per capita on health care as do the people of any other country,” when there are at least six countries whose spending exceeds half of what the United States spends per capita.

But they missed an outright falsehood that was really two lies in one.

During the debate, Biden attacked Sanders for failing to explain how much his plan will cost, or how it will be paid for.

“Imagine you’re going to unite the country walking into the Congress, say ‘I got this bill, it’s going to provide Medicare for everybody, I can’t tell you how much it’s going to cost, we’ll find out later, it’s likely to be double whatever everything we spend in the federal government,’ who do you think is going to get that passed?” Biden said, and added “I busted my neck getting Obamacare past, getting every Democratic vote, I know how hard it is.”

“Well for a start, what the studies show, if we do what Joe wants, we’ll be spending some 50 trillion dollars on healthcare over the next 10 years,” Sanders said, which is a complete lie.

The study Sanders referred to is a Center for Medicare Services analysis of overall health care spending “under current law,” not the Biden plan.

Sanders compounded the lie by adding “That’s the status quo Joe, that’s what Health and Human Services says,” when Biden’s plan — whatever you think of it — would not be the status quo.

In other words, Sanders used the figures for overall spending as if they were the figures for Biden’s plan, and then implied HHS bagged Biden’s plan for being more of the “status quo.” But they were talking about the status quo … not Biden’s plan to overhaul it.

“What we’ve got to do is understand, simple questions Joe, we are spending twice as much per capita on health care as do the people of any other country,” Sanders added, which is — as CNN pointed out — false.

Watch the clip above via ABC News.