The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s PolitiFact operation over the weekend tried to “fact-check” something I said. It didn’t work out the way they wanted, apparently, so they had to be flexible to avoid saying I was right.

What they tested was something I said on Brian Kilmeade’s radio show on Dec. 5. You can listen yourself – it’s in the first minute of the program. I said that the “Affordable Care Act” isn’t very affordable:

“It’s certainly not affordable. In Wisconsin, I think the average that I’ve seen is, if you’re 27 years old, you’re going to be paying about 100, more than 100%, double what you paid on average, for health care. So it’s not affordable. An average plan for a family didn’t go down by $2,500 per year, it’s going up about $2,500 per year. So, I mean, it’s a totally misnamed law.”

PolitiFact checked whether I was right, as they paraphrased it, that “An average (annual) plan for a family didn't go down by $2,500, it's gone up about $2,500.”

Which PolitiFact finds is exactly true. They write of the promise, “Obama pledged to sign a health care bill into law that would ‘cut the cost of a typical family's premium by up to $2,500 a year.’ PolitiFact National rated that a Promise Broken.”

You can read what the president promised. He promised it in Janesville. When he was selling himself to the public, he promised it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Premiums did not go down. They went up. PolitiFact concedes this: “As Johnson indicated, the average annual premium was $2,581 higher in 2013 than when the Affordable Care Act was adopted in 2010.”

These are the figures, from the authoritative Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual surveys:

PolitiFact checked two clauses and found each of them perfectly true. And that was all I said on this point. I did not say that premiums went up because of Obamacare, only that the law did not do what the president promised it would do three years after it was enacted and five years after Barack Obama made his promise. PolitiFact concedes this, saying one of my aides “told us the senator was merely observing in the radio interview that premiums had risen in spite of Obama's promise.”

So PolitiFact had to use its imagination, claiming that “implicit in Johnson’s claim is that Obamacare, to some extent, is responsible.” No, that’s not implicit in the claim. The “Affordable” Care Act may drive average premium increases in coming years, especially now that millions of people are being forced by the law to drop affordable plans they selected and to buy coverage that often costs much more. But I did not say that was driving prices before now. I only said that the president’s promise didn’t work out at all.

George Mitchell at Right Wisconsin puts it best:

“(PolitiFact) creates a new claim — one that Johnson did not make — and says ‘there is little or no evidence that Obamacare is responsible’ for the premium increase. As a result, (it) rates Johnson’s claim as being ‘half true.’

“But Johnson neither (1) said that Obamacare was responsible nor (2) implied or hinted that it was responsible. The only untrue part is the part . . . invented and tacked on so that PolitiFact could avoid having to say that the conservative Johnson was right.”