President Obama spent the entire month of March saying "In your FACE, Republicans!" about how great the Affordable Care Act is because it has saved lots of lives and lots of money -- OR HAS IT?

One of the president's many jaw-dropping claims is that "we’ve seen 50,000 fewer preventable patient deaths in hospitals," which seemed UNPOSSIBLE to the Washington Post's fact-checker Glenn Kessler, because WOW, that's kind of a lot of lives, isn't it?

This number jumped out at us during the president’s recent speech hailing his health-care law. Could 50,000 people have not died in hospitals because of the Affordable Care Act?

That seemed rather extraordinary, even given the size of the United States.

Kessler is a Very Serious Checker of Facts: He once gave the president four Pinocchios (that's a journalistic term of art that means "liar, liar, pants on fire, so's your mom!") because:

Notably, during a debate with Republican nominee Mitt Romney, President Obama said that he immediately told the American people that the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya “was an act of terror.” But now he says he called it “an act of terrorism.”

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So as a noted expert on how Obama is a big fat liar all the time, of course Kessler had to investigate this bold could-not-possibly-be-true claim that making affordable health care accessible to more Americans has reduced the number of deaths that could be prevented if only people had greater access to affordable health care.

Kessler looked at a lot of studies and numbers and wrote a lot of words, and he did have what he admits is one "relatively minor quibble":

The president’s statement could have been a bit more precisely worded to reflect some of the uncertainty in the estimate: “likely a major reason why we’ve seen an estimated 50,000 fewer preventable patient deaths in hospitals.”

But at least the president didn't deliberately leave out any major -isms that would have changed the entire meaning of his sentiment, as he is so apt to do, so Kessler concludes that Obamacare really has saved all those lives after all and "the president’s claim appears worthy of the elusive Geppetto Checkmark," which is another journalistic term of art that means "Yup, what he said, in your FACE, Republicans."

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[WaPo]