Biden’s Campaign-Style Distortions – FactCheck.org

No officers were killed during the attack, although one officer, Brian Sicknick of the U.S. Capitol Police, died of a stroke the next day and four others later committed suicide.

As Biden increasingly talks about “MAGA Republicans’” threat to democracy, the president often brings up the Capitol attack and has taken to telling a story that may leave the impression that several police officers were killed that day.

At the Aug. 25 fundraiser in Maryland, Biden recalled attending the G7 summit in England in June 2021 and coming away concerned about the impression the Capitol attack left on foreign leaders.

Biden, Aug. 25: And one of the things I said — I said, “America is back.” And [French President Emmanuel] Macron looked at me. He said, “For how long?” I seriously had to think about it.

What do you think we’d say, we’d think if we left here, went inside and the way through, and one of the CNN or C-SPAN was on, and they showed a picture of several thousand people storming the British Parliament, knocking down the doors of the Parliament, going in, and ransacking the place and killing several police officers? What would we think? I’m not — I’m being deadly earnest now. What would we think about the state of the world and the state of not just Great Britain, the state of the world in Europe?

Five days later in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Biden repeated the story about the G7 summit and rioters “killing several police officers” during an attack on Parliament.

Biden, Aug. 30: And one of them [foreign leader] said to me, “Imagine, Joe, if you turned on the television in Washington, D.C., and saw a mob of a thousand people storming down the hallways of the parliament, breaking down the doors trying to overturn an outcome of election and killing several police officers in the meantime. Imagine. Imagine what you’d think.”

Think about what the world saw. Not what we saw — what the world saw. Did you ever think, in the United States, that would happen?

As we said, police officers were brutally attacked on Jan. 6, 2021, but no officers were killed that day.

Sicknick — a 13-year veteran of the Capitol Police — collapsed when he returned to his office on Jan. 6, 2021, was taken to the hospital and died at about 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 7, Capitol Police said at the time.

District of Columbia Chief Medical Examiner Francisco J. Diaz said the autopsy showed Sicknick had no internal or external injuries and that he died of a stroke, not homicide — although he also told the Washington Post that “all that transpired [during the Capitol attack] played a role in his condition.”

Four other police officers committed suicide in the days and months after the riot.

A 51-year-old Capitol Police officer, Howard Liebengood, took his own life three days after the riots, and D.C. Police Officer Jeffrey Smith, 35, killed himself nine days after the riots. In July 2021, two other D.C. police officers who responded to the Capitol on Jan. 6 committed suicide.

For more about these and other deaths of those at the Capitol that day, see our article “How Many Died as a Result of Capitol Riot?”

ACA and Preexisting Conditions

It’s true that the Affordable Care Act prohibits insurance plans from charging more or denying coverage to those with preexisting conditions, in any insurance market. But Biden inflated the impact of the ACA, wrongly saying at the Aug. 25 DNC rally that “if you don’t have the Affordable Care Act, people … with a preexisting cannot get insurance.”

Plenty of Americans with preexisting conditions had insurance before the ACA.

The law’s impact in this realm was most acutely experienced on the individual market, where people without employer-based or government health plans buy their own insurance. Pre-ACA, insurance policies on the individual market could, and did, charge more, exclude certain benefits and outright deny insurance to people based on their preexisting medical conditions.

But those with employer-based plans had some protections before the ACA was enacted in 2010. Back then, thanks to HIPAA, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, employer plans couldn’t deny insurance to workers, or charge them more based on health status. But the plans could exclude coverage for a particular health condition for a limited amount of time — up to a year — if a new worker had about a two-month gap in insurance coverage within the year prior to being hired.

We’ve explained these details before, including when Biden made similar misleading claims about the impact of the ACA’s preexisting condition provisions.

About half of the U.S. population had employer-based coverage in 2020. It’s safe to say that the ACA’s protections have taken on greater significance during the coronavirus pandemic, as enrollment in ACA marketplace plans (which are part of the individual market) increased and many Americans may have experienced gaps in coverage with the pandemic-related economic upheaval. And of course the protections are reassuring for anyone who might leave, lose or retire early from a job and need to seek insurance outside the employer-based market.

But Biden is wrong to flatly state that without the ACA, those with preexisting conditions “cannot get insurance.”

The president also overstated the law’s impact at the DNC Aug. 25 reception, when he said “people didn’t know the only reason anyone with a preexisting condition could have health care was because of the ACA.” He went on to accurately state: “So, under the ACA, whether you have a preexisting condition or not, you get covered.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.