Public broadcasting took a hard shot on the integrity-chin the day they took their first corporate dollar.
National Public Radio has a founding charter that says its mission is to “serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard.” What a joke that is, unless those unheard voices belong to people with car problems, investors, people who like word games, or fans of the fluffy interview. I think of NPR as being just like ABC, but with better production values. (How many interviews have you heard on NPR with gurgling brooks or birds singing in the background?)
Back in the 1990’s, NPR did some good investigative work on the Archer Daniels Midland lysine scandal so well covered in the current movie The Informant. ADM did the logical thing – it started giving NPR money. End of problem.
Public Broadcasting System is to TV what NPR is to radio. It is mostly an investors’ network where Ken Burns gets to try out his stuff. They have done some good work in the past, and Bill Moyers has had slot there, and the Frontline show was once a solid investigative program.
T.R. Reid is a documentary film maker who did a show called Sick Around the World that took a close look at health care systems in France, The U.K., Japan and Taiwan. Frontline asked for a follow-up, and Reid made Sick Around America.
But if you watched the Frontline show on PBS, nowhere in the credits will you see T.R. Reid’s name. He pulled out and split with Frontline before it aired.
The reason: Reid noticed that other countries that have successful universal health care systems have outlawed for-profit insurance for basic care. Frontline would not let him air that fact.
Since that was pretty much the whole thrust of the documentary, that for-profit health insurance is at the heart of our problem, Reid decided that he could not be associated with it, nor ever again with Frontline.
Russell Mokhiber writes about this at Counterpunch. Amazingly, PBS went beyond merely undermininig Reid’s message. They completely contradicted it, airing instead the following interview with Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lead health insurance lobby in the United States.
Moderator: Other developed countries guarantee coverage for everyone. We asked Karen Ignagni why it can’t work here.
Karen Ignagni: Well, it would work if we did what other countries do, which is have a mandate that everybody participate. And if everybody is in, it’s quite reasonable to ask our industry to do guarantee issue, to get everybody in. So, the answer to your question is we can, and the public here will have to agree to do what the public in other countries have done, which is a consensus that everybody should be in.
Moderator: That’s what other developed countries do. They make insurers cover everyone, and they make all citizens buy insurance. And the poor are subsidized.
No mention of outlawing for-profit insurance everywhere else in the world – instead, and American health insurance lobbyist pushing what would months later become the Baucus plan – mandated coverage without a public option.
The United States is badly in need of a public health care system, and a public broadcasting outlet, one that “serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard.”
Piece of Mindful 
I suppose you took “…go on the web and complain about it.” very seriously. I do have agree, the public radio/television broadcast have become increasingly, just another lobbyist poster board, able to lean to whatever side the “wallet” is on. But tread lightly on public option, my own very elaborate (funded in whole; by me) investigation shows that these other countries and their fantastic Health care pogroms err, I mean programs are really not that great. In fact, they lack luster when compared to the options available to the public of the U.S., rich or poor.
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“Lack luster” vs. dropped, unqualified/pre-existing condition, dead. No contest.
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name 1(one) person who has ever been denied care? denied access to doctor? denied medication?\
The reason health care is so expensive in this country, is because it is bar none, the best in the world! Being the spouse of a physician, and an administrator of sorts myself, have never in my storied history, heard of a single person, being turned away from any clinic, hospital, doctors office when treatment is necessary. based solely on financial/political well being. Bring us your tired, poor, destitute even Micheal Moore, and they will receive whatever care is necessary, in the interest of their well-being! This, with numerous ways to deal with any bill received, including several government, private and other sources that already exist and have for decades!! so that the latter list can always receive treatment. Without the “its too much money” excuse. If you look at all government ran health-care programs across this planet, you find heavy handed, low budget , inadequate blocked & withheld treatments, pharmaceuticals, patient care, technology and many many other shortcomings!
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My mother was denied medication. Her doctor said she needed to use Aldara cream for her skin cancer. The Insurance company overrode the doctor, and said she didn’t need it.
My brother was denied care. His insurance company refused to pay for his last day in the hospital, saying that the hospital should have known to discharge him to Hospice.
There’s a great letter in today’s Denver Post about this thing called denied claims – last I heard, 21% of claims denied in CA by the five biggest insurers. I’ll print that letter soon.
Access to care and payment for care are two different things. It is true that hospital emergency rooms cannot turn away patients, but they do pursue all of them for payment until proven uncollectible. And that’s a lousy way to do health care anyway. However, it is not true that doctors and clinics and hospitals do not turn away patients. First, patients are discouraged from going to doctors for non-emergent care due to costs, and doctors are free to turn away anyone they please.
I do beleive that if insurance companies got out of the way, stopped siphoning off 19-20% of premiums for overhead and costing hospitals and doctors another 10-11% for administration (31% total), that we would indeed, bar none, have the best health care in the world. Other countries do not report near the level of dissatisfaction with health care that we do here.
However, a recent poll in Canada found a very high level of satisfaction, and even with full knowledge of how our system works, 86% said that they would not want an American-style system.
We do have some unique problems in the U.S. that they don’t face elsewhere – for one, Type 2 diabetes is almost an epidemic here due to our crappy food system. That’s a very expensive disease to treat. That is one thing that makes us more expensive, but the rest is pure greed and inefficiency.
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Mark, your kindness and patience to nitzkreb and other aliens settling here from other galaxies is impressive. Education, education, education.
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Odd thing to say about a curmudgeon!
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