90% of America v. Somebody from a Fake Think Tank
| By MattSinger - Jun 8th, 2006 at 4:56 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
The modern notion of journalistic balance is truly incredible. To get a snapshot image of how horribly it distorts media coverage, take a look at this AP Story titled "Americans Want Universal Coverage, Group Says:"
The article goes on to cite Sarah Berk of Health Care America, a mis-named organization that desires free market solutions to our health care problem. They might be more accurately named Heart Attack America or Emergency Room America.
But the mere fact that the Citizens' Health Care Working Group, an organization started by a moderate Democrat and a conservative Republican, somehow needs to be responded to with a quote from a right-wing group you've never heard of while not providing any quotations from a left-of-center group is mildly mind-boggling.
Consider the Center's polling on health care. Roughly 90% of Americans think our system is in need of overhaul. Other polls show support for health care for all, even when it involves tax increases, is around 2/3 of the public. Focus groups reveal that the public, when they learn the facts, support single-payer health care.
And then a bipartisan commission heads out into America and hears from 23,000 people and concludes that basic health care should be provided to all.
What's the response?
Quote some former staffer for Rick Santorum now on the take from the medical industrial complex?
"Assuring health care is a shared social responsibility," says the interim report of the Citizens' Health Care Working Group, a 14-member committee that went to 50 communities and heard from 23,000 people.
[...]
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, said he and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, came up with the idea for establishing a group that would work outside of Washington to find out what Americans want. He said they were tired of years of gridlock on health care issues.
[...]
[S]ome groups are already wary.
The article goes on to cite Sarah Berk of Health Care America, a mis-named organization that desires free market solutions to our health care problem. They might be more accurately named Heart Attack America or Emergency Room America.
But the mere fact that the Citizens' Health Care Working Group, an organization started by a moderate Democrat and a conservative Republican, somehow needs to be responded to with a quote from a right-wing group you've never heard of while not providing any quotations from a left-of-center group is mildly mind-boggling.
Consider the Center's polling on health care. Roughly 90% of Americans think our system is in need of overhaul. Other polls show support for health care for all, even when it involves tax increases, is around 2/3 of the public. Focus groups reveal that the public, when they learn the facts, support single-payer health care.
And then a bipartisan commission heads out into America and hears from 23,000 people and concludes that basic health care should be provided to all.
What's the response?
Quote some former staffer for Rick Santorum now on the take from the medical industrial complex?
!
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As Southern Oregon Universities Student Senate President Pro-Tempore (03-04) I began to lobby the administration, the state university system administration, and a host of State Government officials from top to bottom. Here is one example of what I told everyone who would listen (on this issue),
State health care plans are put in place for those in need, and are often funded by federal funding as well. The fact that the landmark Oregon Health Plan, which offers OHP+ covering prescriptions to hospitalization for the poor for a small fee in many cases, has not been offered to every student in the entire OUS and Community College system, the healthiest quarter-million in the state for the most part, is simply disgraceful. If you want to save the state health care plan, it would seem unconscionable to ignore a quarter-million students who would be happy to keep a dependent’s, or their own illness, from breaking their budgets. If a state can do this for the poor for free, it can surely do it for a small fee for the students who will soon be the workers who pay higher taxes from the higher salaries they will earn.
RJ4USA