Most of chain e-mail's assertions about health bill are lies, say independent, nonpartisan analysts

A widely circulated, chain e-mail about the health-reform bill passed by a House committee "contains 48 claims. Twenty-six of them are false and the rest mostly misleading. Only four are true," the independent, nonpartisan analysts at FactCheck.org say in their latest post.

Among the lies: A government committee will decide what treatments individual patients will get, illegal aliens will get free care, and "The federal government will have direct, real-time access to all individual bank accounts for electronic funds transfer." Repeating: These are lies.

"We can trace the origins of this collection of claims to a conservative blogger who issued his instant and mostly mistaken analyses as brief 'tweets' sent via Twitter as he was paging through the 1,017-page bill," Brooks Jackson, Lori Robertson and Jess Henig write. "The claims have been embraced as true and posted on hundreds of Web sites, and forwarded in the form of chain e-mails countless times. But there’s hardly any truth in them."

We've said it before and we'll say it again: It is the responsibility of all news media, large and small, urban and rural, to set the record straight on the biggest issue of our day. We trust FactCheck, and you can, too.