You’ve heard plenty of claims about Amy McGrath and Andy Barr. Here’s the truth.

U.S. Rep. Andy Barr and challenger Amy McGrath have seized control of television screens throughout Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District to decry their opponent, define themselves and win over voters in a competitive race that could determine which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sometimes, though, facts have taken a backseat in the endless stream of soundbites the Republican incumbent from Lexington and the Democratic challenger from Georgetown have dumped on voters. Here’s a check on four statements made by Barr, McGrath and the groups that support them.

“Amy McGrath wants to help Nancy Pelosi pass a thirty-two trillion dollar government takeover of health care… The Pelosi-McGrath plan is socialized medicine…” — The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican PAC (television ad)

Republicans are citing a McGrath quote in which she says “If we were to build a health care system from scratch, single-payer would be the way to go.”

But the ad cuts out the second half of her answer: “But we have a very complex health care system in America and right now we have the Affordable Care Act, that just came into effect a few years ago. I believe, as with every major piece of legislation in this country, we should try to make it work.”

McGrath has said she wants to improve the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, by passing legislation to slow the growth of premiums and deductibles.

The two ideas she talks about most are a Medicare buy-in and a public option for health insurance.

The Medicare buy-in would let people who are older than 55 “buy-in” to the federal program before they become eligible for coverage at 65.

A public option would be a federally-run insurance program that people could choose as an alternative to the private insurance program offered by their employer. McGrath has compared this to the government’s insurance program for military veterans.

“I had government medicine for 20, 40 years,” McGrath said. “It was awesome. I had nothing bad to say at all. And now I’m under the VA system. It’s not bad at all.”

“In Kentucky, we respect our troops. But congressman Andy Barr would let payday lenders take advantage of them. Barr took $36,000 from payday lenders, then let them stick our troops with outrageous fees.” —With Honor PAC (television ad)

Barr has received $36,550 from payday lenders since his 2014 campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

He also voted for a bill called the Financial CHOICE Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives but faltered in the Senate. The bill aimed to roll-back provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

With Honor focused on one line in the bill that limited the power of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that enforces financial regulations. The bill said “the Agency may not exercise any rulemaking, enforcement, or other authority with respect to payday loans, vehicle title loans, or other similar loans.”

While that provision would have scaled back protections for everyday citizens, it wouldn’t directly affect military veterans because of a 2006 law that protects military families from predatory lenders by putting a cap on the amount of interest small-dollar lenders can charge on loans to military families. Opponents of Barr, though, argue that the government’s ability to enforce this rule would have been hampered by the Financial CHOICE Act.

“[Amy McGrath] is for open borders and she called a border wall ‘stupid.’” — Rep. Andy Barr ( GOP Lincoln Dinner fundraiser)

McGrath did call a border wall stupid, but that’s different from advocating for open borders.

“I care about secure borders,” McGrath said at her Anderson County field office opening in July. “We absolutely have to have it. Folks, I fought for my country. I fought to have secure borders. We want to know who’s coming into our country.”

Instead of spending billions of dollars to build a wall, McGrath said she thinks the country should invest in technology to secure the border (something Barr also thinks should be done), specifically by increasing electronic surveillance of the border.

She also opposed President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, which led to the separation of children of undocumented immigrants from their parents. She has said the current system criminalizes people who are seeking amnesty in the United States.

“The family separation policy is absolutely wrong,” she said in Lawrenceburg, weeks after the Trump administration backed down and ended the policy. “It is wrong and cruel.”

While Barr supports Trump’s wall proposal (he voted for two bills that would have appropriated money for it) he also uses the phrase as shorthand to invest more money in border security in general.

“You’ve probably seen the inevitable attack ads that try to say I’m not like you, that I’ll go to Washington and vote the party line… that’s exactly what [Andy Barr has] done 98 percent of the time.” — Amy McGrath (television ad)

McGrath is citing a report from Congressional Quarterly that said Barr voted with his party 98 percent of the time in 2017.

That number generally falls in line with FiveThirtyEight’s analysis that Barr voted with President Donald Trump’s position 96.8 percent of the time.

When asked about the claim, Barr pushed back, noting that the score includes a lot of technical votes where members of Congress routinely vote with their party’s leadership.

“You can cite whatever statistics you want which take into account procedural votes that run up a score… that number is meaningless,” Barr said. “If you actually look at the work we have done, which is demonstrably bipartisan in delivering results.”

When FiveThirtyEight excluded procedural motions and only counted roll call votes, they found Barr still voted with the Republican Party 86 percent of the time during “recent sessions in Congress.”

Barr ranks as the 135th most bipartisan member of Congress out of 435, according to the Lugar Center and Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

Barr points to his bipartisan efforts on bills to eliminate race-day doping in the horse industry and impose financial sanctions on North Korea to show that he has a record of working with Democrats in one of the most partisan Congresses in history.

This story was originally published October 22, 2018 at 12:21 PM.