A look back at Lie of the Year

PolitiFact’s editors and reporters award the Lie of the Year to the most significant falsehood or exaggeration of the past 12 months. Here’s a look back at the past six years of "winners."

2014: Exaggerations about Ebola

In 2014, there were two just Ebola-related deaths in the United States, yet fear of the disease stretched to every corner of the country, stoked by exaggerated claims from politicians and pundits. They said, wrongly, that Ebola was easy to catch, that illegal immigrants may be carrying the virus across the southern border, that it was all part of a government or corporate conspiracy.

The false claims distorted the debate about a serious public health issue and edged the nation toward panic. In all, PolitiFact and PunditFact rated 16 separate Ebola claims as Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, so we chose this collection as our 2014 Lie of the Year.

2013: 'If you like your health care plan, you can keep it'

President Barack Obama and other Democrats made this claim when marketing the Affordable Care Act. But in the fall of 2013, people started to receive insurance cancellation notices, definitively proving the statement wrong.

Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous. Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting the claim had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to a rare presidential apology.

2012: Mitt Romney campaign's ad on Jeeps made in China

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney’s campaign unleashed an ad suggesting that Jeep was pulling its plants out of Ohio, a critical swing state, for China. But the Ohio Jeep plants weren’t going anywhere; the moves in China were to expand into the Chinese auto market.

People often say that politicians don’t pay a price for deception, but this time was different: A flood of negative press coverage rained down on the Romney campaign, and he failed to turn the tide in Ohio, a key battleground state in the presidential election.

2011: 'Republicans voted to end Medicare'

After two years of being pounded by Republicans with often false charges about the 2010 health care law, the Democrats turned the tables. They slammed Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives for voting for a cost-cutting budget resolution promoted by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

Democrats said voting for this resolution amounted to voting to end Medicare. But Ryan never proposed ending Medicare; instead he wanted to bring more private insurers into the program. Democrats later modified their talking point to say Republicans wanted to end Medicare "as we know it."

2010:  'A government takeover of health care'

As lawmakers finalized the Affordable Care Act, Republicans couldn’t stop repeating their mantra that the law is a government takeover of health care. It’s not.

"Government takeover" conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the Affordable Care Act relies largely on the free market, and it does not nationalize the country’s health system in any way.

2009: 'Death panels'

Sarah Palin was the first to say the Affordable Care Act included "death panels" -- PolitiFact’s very first Lie of the Year. Government boards that would determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care were wholly fictional. Yet about 30 percent of the public in 2009 believed they were part of the health care law.

This wasn’t hard to fact-check. There were not -- and still aren’t -- any such death panels in the law.