David Crisp of the Billings Outpost wrote this article, Unveiling Obamacare, as a journalistic piece. It brought to mind Krugman’s comment about how journalists would deal with a flat earth if powerful people disagreed: “Shape of the earth: views differ.”
First, Mr Crisp: He is an accomplished man, a scholar. He can write on a host of topics and be interesting and insightful. Anyone who has met him will tell you that he is sincere and nice and unassuming. This is not about him.
However, in reading this piece, along with so many others put out by our journalists, I wonder why the rules of their game forbid being insightful. The piece in question does what they claim to be their only job: bring us the facts, let us decide.
The problem with this is that the “facts” are always narrowly wedged between our two corrupt political parties. But journalists assume that if they get a quote from each party, they’ve covered it. And in so doing, they miss virtually everything. “Bipartisan” reporting excludes “nonpartisan” thinking as well. Most issues require insight falling outside of party boundaries. It ain’t available.
In this piece, for example, there is not a word about the type of coverage that “Obamacare” will embrace. There is a passing mention of “Platinum” policies that might be offered. In other countries, like the one just north of us, such policies might be considered low-level “basic care.” But our expectations have been tempered by the Democrats and Obama, and few of us can afford “platinum.” Most of us if insured at all will end up severely underinsured. We need to know that.
If he included that little touch of insight, even though not expressed by ops from either party, and Mr. Crisp would have offered insight. But in so doing, he will have violated the rules of journalism: insight is not objective.
Here’s more insight that journalists are not allowed to bring us:
- When Senator Baucus took single payer “off the table,” he was making a strategic move. In so doing, he framed the debate so that the bill that had already been written and would eventually pass would not include a public option. Had single payer been on the table the public option would have been a fallback, and that could not be allowed.
- There were only a few mandates placed on insurers, among them an annual physical and certain tests, like mammograms. There was not meaningful requirement to offer solid basic care.
- The whole “debate” about ACA was carefully timed and staged to make it appear that there was logrolling going on behind the scenes. There was not.
- The “Tea Party” played a strategic role in perception management. It came about largely by means of manipulation of suggestible souls, and was given an unusually high degree of exposure.
- The appearance of wild-eyed right wingers at public meetings and rallies sealed the perception that Obama was offering some kind of “left” alternative when he was really bearing down on us with a right-wing ideal: The private mandate, indenture to private fiefdoms.
- While it may appear that members of the Tea Party were stupid dupes, the real target of their manipulated protesting was Democrats. They totally got sucked in, and so were co-opted as part of a right-wing coup for AHIP.
- Since passage of the bill, insurance companies have been scaling back coverages, lowering our expectations. They will no longer cover physician office visits unless it is part of some kind of “platinum” policy that only well-to-do will purchase.
All that Obamacare did was extend the reach of private insurers, maximizing their profits while lowering the quality of care we can access. But Mr. Crisp’s article, “he said-she said,” focused only on premiums and ignored actual health care coverage. It’s like reporting on a baseball game without telling us the final score. It’s all factual and useless.
That’s how our perceptions are being framed now, and sadly, journalists are active participants in the framing and hanging of this lousy bill.
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Footnote: I should add here that local newspapers serve mostly a community diaries and TV schedules, so that editors and publishers cannot be expected to have expertise on far-flung and complex issues. However, Mr. Crisp offered this piece in journalistic fashion as containing essential knowledge so that its shortcomings are, in my view, fair game.
Piece of Mindful 
And before it was Obamacare, or Baucuscare, it was Governor Romneycare, scripted and handed to him by the Heritage Foundation. What more needs to be known beyond that?
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If you are saying that the ACA system is desgned to dail, it will because you cannot build health insurance on private profit. But the success of the insurance companies with tens of billikns in new subsidy guarantees that ACA stays
There is a provision allowing states to go that way in 2021. One can hope it stays in place but AHIP knows if obe atate escapes they all do.
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You could say that the coal industry is worth 10s of billions of dollars and yet the govt. is putting them out of business.
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Which companies?
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All of them.
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/morganbrittany/2013/07/01/obama-on-track-to-bankrupt-the-coal-industry-and-this-country-n1631288/page/full
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Probably none of them but i think we might agree that it is nuts to run health care through employers. Government is the way to go as, again, every other fooking industrialized country has slapped your face with to no avail because you don’t let evidence interfere with ideology.
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Yeah, what was I thinking.
This model is bound to save us all money.
http://www.jec.senate.gov/republicans/public/index.cfm?ContentRecord_id=bb302d88-3d0d-4424-8e33-3c5d2578c2b0&p=CommitteeNews
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Hey Mark. Hear about Detroit?
Single Payer/Obamacare is Detroit.
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Detroit. First major city to “Go Galt”.
All the “makers” left leaving only the “takers”.
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From what I’ve learned here lately, Detroit is a hero city. Why pay back the Man? If he lent you money, clearly that means he has too much, because all excess $$$ belongs to the government. All money in municipal bonds is excess wealth collected by cheating sociopaths. Detroit discovered a way to harness this wealth: borrow it, and not pay it back. Its all good.
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Government is the way to go
But you often remind us that the US government is a different cat from other governments. Ours is different. Why should we trust them with health care in toto, when they are the ones who have given us the current system? Is this leopard going to change its spots?
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Mark we’ve had this fight time and again. Obamacare was destined to fail in order to establish a single payer system.
Its just coming too late for your 65th birthday.
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Reply above.
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Here’s you daily humor:
I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.
I’m from the tea party and I’m here to help you.
I’m from the neighborhood watch and I’m here to help you.
And finally, the funniest one of all!
I’m from the insurance industry and I’m here to help you!! Yeah RIGHT!
The affordable care act should actually be called the affordable INSURANCE act, for it has nothing to do with care. Essentially, there IS no actual health care in this country except for the lucky few, mainly the rich and those with government benefits. The rest of us are third worlders on our own! Hell, just TRY to find a doctor some time. Most of us, if we go at all, go to PA’s.
Obamacare is a disaster, and using a disaster as a means to single payer seems a helluva way to go about it!
Keep writing, Mark. You are the only one doing so that I know of.
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Essentially, there IS no actual health care in this country except for the lucky few, mainly the rich and those with government benefits.
Seems a little over the top.
I don’t buy the Tomato Guy thesis that there is all this better care at a lower price just waiting to burst out of the gate if we would just pass the right law.
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Um, Freddy, I’m glad to hear that you and yours are so healthy and NEED no health care. Are you with the Post Office or the military? Or which branch of govt. are you with?
Not over the top in my neighborhood, the real world.
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Tell me about the people you know who don’t have health care. We could take up a collection for them.
I see: a) those covered by work/institutions and the self insured
b) the local immigrants who go to the emergency room for routine care
c) those who tough it out without insurance; get sick; go to the hospital; run up a big, inflated bill; skip out on the bill, declare bankruptcy, get community donations, other help.
This seems to be our de facto health care system.
I doubt your implication that there are vast swaths of people dying across this country from lack of access to mainstream health care.
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“I doubt your implication that there are vast swaths of people dying across this country from lack of access to mainstream health care”
Jesus, Freddy, you must be about what, 25 years old? Living with your parents? On your dad’s military health plan?
Seriously, dude, how ’bout just a wee bit about what kind of JOB you have, and how old you are, and how you would have ANY idea how others live? Such a case of terminal naivete I have never SEEN before.
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