CommonDreams: Why Has the Press Failed Us In Reporting on Health Care Reform?

[marmar]

Published on Sunday, April 12, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Why Has the Press Failed Us In Reporting on Health Care Reform?
An Open Letter to Bill Keller, Executive Editor, New York Times, and Clark Hoyt, Public Editor, New York Times

by Benjamin Day


Dear Bill Keller and Clark Hoyt,

For the first time in the span of a generation, national health care reform is back on the horizon, and I'm writing to you to step back for a moment into the history of the Times's reporting on health care reform. Last year I began a research project with two researchers from Harvard Medical School, Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, to look at the history of major state health reforms such as TennCare, the Oregon Health Plan, MinnesotaCare, and many others. A sweeping health reform bill had been passed into law in Massachusetts in 2006 that was being hailed as a unique, first-of-its-kind bipartisan strategy to achieve universal or near-universal health coverage without raising taxes or adding new regulations on the health care industry. We initially set out to find how unique the Massachusetts health reform law really was compared to previous state efforts, and to see if by analyzing the outcomes of those earlier reform efforts we could learn some lessons about what to expect in Massachusetts.

What we found surprised us, and a summary write up of our findings was published in the International Journal of Health Services. We found that, aside from the "individual mandate" in Massachusetts requiring many of the uninsured to purchase their own private health plan or face tax penalties, many reforms in other states - indeed, even in our own state in the recent past - were almost identical to the Mass plan in their goals and structure. They also all failed to achieve their stated goals of reducing the uninsured population in their respective states and/or of controlling rising health care costs. The most ambitious of these, TennCare in 1994 and a large Medicaid expansion in Massachusetts also in the mid-1990s, were able to reduce the uninsured in their respective states for a period of several years. However, the financing of these plans all proved unsustainable over time, enrollment was often capped or benefits eroded, and a few short years after passage every state found itself back where it started: with high and rising health care costs and a large and growing uninsured population. We titled our article "State Health Reform Flatlines.

What we found even more surprising than this history of failed reform efforts, though, was media coverage of the legislation. Articles by our most respected news organizations hailed state reform after state reform as pioneering, likely to serve as models for the nation, and designed to control costs and extend health coverage to the uninsured. No reasonable reader of the news available at the time these laws were passed would expect that they might fail entirely to reduce the uninsured over time, or that they might not succeed in controlling costs at all. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/12-2

[leftstreet]

1. They know that Americans want Single Payer

The Ruling Class, not so much.

So the WaterCarrier Press must fight it.

[TheKentuckian]

2. That is correct!

Though, its possibly more of a split among the ruling class than we'd think on the surface. I think it would be a boon to most sectors. Big Pharm and Leechsurance...not so much, "lucky" they buy a megaphone voice in the discussion. That and some probably well placed fears of such a thing putting the people in a frame of mind to take a more fair piece of the pie.

[Captain Hilts]

3. Because the major media are employed and wealthy enough for it not to be a problem. Besides,

PhRMA is a major sponsor and advertiser with their firms.