As the Senate continues the health care debate, special interest groups continue filling the airwaves with commercials asking you to tell your senators how to vote.
There's a lot of spin out there, so FOX16 tracked down an expert to help untangle it all.
From commercials to rallies across Arkansas, health care reform is polarizing the populace drawing not only political heavy weights to weigh-in, but regular americans to rally, too.
"It requires everyone to get health insurance and sends them to jail if they don't, and makes them pay 15-thousand dollars average for health insurance," said former Clinton aide Dick Morris.
"With these five-thousand letters, we know that she can do that by voting for a health care bill with a public option, " said Willie Holmes as he dropped off letters to Senator Lincoln's office.
With all of this information out there, it seems like you can't turn on the TV right now without seeing special interest group commercials spinning health care reform, so how can you separate fact from fiction?
FOX16 went to UALR professor Joe Giammo to untangle the spin. He says the message is simple. "It's either we're going to cover more people and save money or we're going to end up with government run health care, and we're going to have the deficit balloon," he says.
But, the devil's in the details. "It's really hard to get into the details of a two-thousand page bill and say exactly what we're going to do step-by-step," Giammo added.
Giammo also says the key to remember is that nobody actually knows what would happen if the bill's passed. "Even coming from the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, there's speculation about what it's going to cost, speculation about what benefits and what problems it might cause, but because nobody knows for sure, everybody can point to something to say this is what I think is going to happen, and it's either going to be the best thing that ever happened or it's going to be the end of civilization," Giammo said.
Giammo tells FOX16 you'll continue seeing health care reform political adds well into next year, especially looking forward to next November's elections where politicians will likely make voting records on the health care bill a huge campaign issue.
