No, the IRS isn’t going to be posting your medical tests all over the Internet. | REUTERS Mythbusters: Obamacare edition

There are a lot of wild stories about Obamacare that make the debate sound like a fact-free zone.

No, the IRS isn’t going to be posting your medical tests all over the Internet. No, people’s premiums aren’t doubling in the crucial swing state of Ohio. And no, the Obamacare “data hub” isn’t like a new version of the NSA, spying on your hemorrhoids instead of your phone calls.


Those are all claims that are muddying the waters as consumers get ready to sign up for Obamacare for the first time in October. On the other hand, not all of the stories that are swirling around the health care law these days are completely far-fetched. And the Obama administration is spinning some rosy scenarios of its own.

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That’s why these stories need the “MythBusters” test — where, just like the TV show, “busted” means it’s not true, “confirmed” means it’s true and “plausible” means it could happen, but only under certain, narrow conditions.

Here is POLITICO’s Obamacare version of “MythBusters” — and what we found when we tested the wildest stories in the debate:

The IRS is going to be laughing at your medical tests.

Very few things in Obamacare are scarier to conservatives than the IRS role in enforcing it — especially after its targeting of conservative groups.

So Republicans are going to town with warnings that the agency will be able to spy on everyone’s medical records, as if IRS employees will be looking up the embarrassing medical tests of people they don’t like and posting them on the Internet. That could become a talking point again this week, when the House takes up a bill to prohibit the agency from enforcing its parts of Obamacare.

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“Certainly, we don’t need the IRS policing our private health care information,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said during the House debate in May over an Obamacare repeal bill. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has said he’s “worried that some of our privacy will be violated.”

The reality, though, is that the only IRS roles in Obamacare are to make sure people have health insurance and give out the subsidies to people who are eligible.

That means the IRS needs to know two things: what kind of health insurance you have — which your employer or insurer will report — and your income, which, really, it knows already. It doesn’t need to know if you had your flu shot.

And even if someone wanted to look for secrets in your medical history, it’s not clear how they’d find them since the Obamacare application doesn’t ask for any medical records.

Rating: Busted

You’ll never know if your information is safe.

There is a more reasonable concern, shared by experts who are closely following the implementation of Obamacare, that other sensitive information will fall into the wrong hands during the screening process.

That’s partly because the federal government is building a “data hub” to help the new health insurance marketplaces gather information quickly from different agencies when you sign up for coverage — like verifying your income level with the IRS, your Social Security number with the Social Security Administration and your citizenship information with the Department of Homeland Security.

All of that is sensitive personal information. Some GOP critics say it’s unclear how secure the hub will be, so there’s no guarantee that sensitive information couldn’t leak out — or be hacked.

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An Obama administration official says that’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the hub will work. It’s not a database and won’t store information, the official said — it’s a routing tool that will just allow connections to different agencies to pull bits of information. To verify someone’s income, for example, the hub won’t pull their entire tax return. It will just pull one bit of information — their income level — and plug it in.

But Brett Graham of Leavitt Partners, which is consulting with states on the construction of the health exchanges, says it would be easier to reassure people that the hub is secure if it had been tested publicly, with the results widely available. Since that hasn’t happened, “we really don’t know whether it’s a small concern or a large concern,” he said.

And the hub is not the only way people’s information can become vulnerable. Graham said it would be easy for “navigators” — the community groups that will help customers enroll in health insurance — to come across sensitive information about the customers’ medical history, especially if the customers themselves blurt it out.

“You could easily see someone saying, ‘Can you tell me what kind of plan I need? I have a heart condition, or I have diabetes, or I have hypertension,’” Graham said. That’s very different from someone intentionally spying on your health care information — but it’s one reason there are gray areas that make it hard to guarantee absolute security.

Rating: Plausible

Your health care costs are going to double.

Two states are playing starring roles in Republicans’ “Obamacare rate shock” warnings: Ohio, which said its health insurance rates for individuals will go up 88 percent, and Indiana, which estimated its individual rates will rise by 72 percent.

Republicans are using those estimates to suggest Obamacare will raise people’s premiums through the roof. The Ohio statement has been a special favorite of House Speaker John Boehner, who used it to suggest that his constituents will have to pay another $200 a month in health care costs.

There’s just one problem: Both states’ insurance departments tell POLITICO that people’s premiums won’t necessarily go up by that much.

For one thing, neither state was actually talking about premiums — they were talking about the basic cost of providing health insurance. In Ohio, that price includes everything, from the costs the insurer will pay to the expenses the customers will pay on their own, according to insurance department spokesman Chris Brock. People who get Obamacare subsidies won’t pay the full cost.

That estimate could change anyway, since those were preliminary rates and Ohio is about to release the final ones.

And neither state tried to distinguish between the four different levels of Obamacare coverage. They just mashed all of the costs together, so a casual customer would have no sense that some plans will be cheaper than others.

Dennis Rosebrough, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Insurance, said it was “virtually impossible to calculate the premiums” because “there are too many variables” — including what level of Obamacare plan people will choose. Under the law, people are supposed to have a choice of four plans — bronze, silver, gold and platinum — with each one covering a larger share of the medical expenses. The law also allows cheaper, catastrophic plans for people under age 30.

“We don’t have the capacity to drill down and figure out every level of this,” Rosebrough said. “That’s why we focused on the cost.” Boehner’s office declined to comment.

That doesn’t mean the costs of individual health insurance won’t go up for people whose employers don’t offer insurance. They almost certainly will, since the individual insurance market includes a lot of bare-bones plans, with skimpier coverage and high deductibles, that are being phased out under Obamacare. But those costs don’t tell you a lot about what people will pay in the end.

Rating: Busted

Just sit back and enjoy the benefits.

Lately, one of President Barack Obama’s favorite talking points is that the health care law won’t touch the majority of Americans who have health insurance — except to give them better benefits, like free preventive care and better consumer protections.

“If you’re one of the nearly 85 percent of Americans who already have insurance, either through Medicare or Medicaid or your employer, you don’t have to do a thing,” Obama said in California in June.

At an April press conference, he was even more reassuring to the insured masses: “Their only impact is that their insurance is stronger, better, more secure than it was before. Full stop. That’s it. They don’t have to worry about anything else.”

The problem is, Obama can’t guarantee that the law won’t touch any of them in worse ways — like leading some employers to drop their health coverage.

There’s no way to be certain how big a problem that could be. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 7 million fewer Americans could have health insurance through their jobs because of the law within 10 years. That’s easily outweighed by the 24 million people who could gain coverage through the Obamacare health insurance exchanges, and the 13 million who could be added to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program — but it will be a big deal for anyone who doesn’t get coverage through the workplace.

And a Gallup survey of small-business owners in April found that 24 percent had considered dropping health insurance for their workers, though that doesn’t mean they’ll all follow through with it.

A White House official downplayed the issue, saying the impact on job-based health coverage is expected to be “negligible” in 2014 and that CBO says the long-term effects are “largely driven by employees choosing different sources of coverage.”

But the bottom line is that Obama can’t promise Americans who already have health insurance that all of them can just relax and enjoy the ride.

Rating: Busted

Obamacare is going to cost your favorite restaurant a million dollars.

A Texas restaurant chain called “Jim’s” got national attention recently when a San Antonio television station interviewed the owner, Jimmy Hasslocher, and reported that he’s staring at a “million-dollar Obamacare bill” when he has to cover his workers.

A million dollars? It may sound like a tabloid headline, but it’s not impossible — because some restaurant chains could, in fact, face a choice between health care costs they can’t afford and fines they can’t afford. It would only happen, though, if they got hit with the worst of many possible outcomes.

Here’s why: Under Obamacare, businesses with the equivalent of at least 50 full-time workers will have to offer health insurance to their employees or pay fines. Another complication: the law defines full time as 30 hours, far lower than the threshold most businesses with low-wage workers currently use.

That requirement has been delayed and won’t be enforced until 2015. But when it kicks in, Hasslocher told the San Antonio TV station that he expects to have as many as 400 workers sign up for health insurance — meaning he’ll have to pay his share of their premiums, at an added expense to him.

It’s impossible to confirm or debunk Hasslocher’s claims completely because only he knows his exact situation, and he didn’t respond to POLITICO’s requests to discuss further details.

But restaurant chains won’t necessarily have to pay for every worker — a fact that Hasslocher didn’t mention in the interview. If they’re young adults, they might be able to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans, also because of Obamacare. They may be able to join a spouse’s plan, sign up for Medicaid if their income is low enough or even just pay their own fines and stay uninsured.

“It’s very hard for the business owner to know how his workforce is going to react,” said Scott DeFife, a lobbyist for the National Restaurant Association. “They have to plan for a variety of scenarios that could have different impacts on their bottom line.”

Obama administration officials don’t dispute that some restaurants and other employers of low-wage workers could be affected, but they say it’s a small minority of businesses that would ever have trouble with the employer mandate — because 96 percent of firms with 50 or more workers already provide health coverage, and the vast majority of businesses have fewer than 50 workers anyway.

The bottom line, according to Paul Fronstin of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, is that “it’s highly assumption-driven. … It’s plausible, but we’ll see. We won’t know until we know.”

Rating: Plausible

You won’t be able to choose your doctor.

That has been a running theme in the Obamacare criticisms, and it was revived in a recent TV ad by Americans for Prosperity, in which a mother worries aloud about where her son will get treatment for his seizures. “If we can’t pick our own doctor, how do I know my family’s going to get the care they need?”

None of these groups, however, can point to a part of the law that says you won’t be able to pick your own doctor — because there isn’t one.

Just like under the private health insurance people have now, health plans under Obamacare will have networks of doctors and other health providers — which, by definition, means you can choose your doctor. It’s possible, if you switch to a different network, that your personal doctor might not be in it — but that can already happen if your employer switches health plans.

You have fewer choices if doctors go out of business, and some critics have raised that possibility because of the law’s tighter Medicare payments. But that’s a lot different than just saying people won’t have a choice at all.

Dave Schwartz, Americans for Prosperity’s Virginia state director, said the line is justified because of CBO’s estimate that 7 million people won’t have health coverage through the workplace because of the law — he says that means they won’t have as many choices of doctors. But many, if not all, of them could get coverage through the health exchanges, and that would still give them a choice of doctors.

Schwartz also cited an estimate that one-third of all doctors won’t accept new Medicaid patients in states that expand Medicaid under Obamacare. But even if that prediction becomes a reality, that would only restrict choices for people on Medicaid — not the vast majority of Americans with private health coverage. And Medicaid patients already have trouble finding doctors because of the program’s low payment rates, not because of Obamacare.

Rating: Busted