Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Instead of enaging in petty politics, the media should be acting in the public insterest in its reporting of the Affordable Care Act and its progress



What can 75 cents buy you? A three section Tuesday edition of the Seattle Times with a total of 26 pages—6 broadsheets and one half-sheet. This must be an all-time record low. How to sell a pointless waste of paper? Well, women like to read about themselves, so put two stories extolling women above the front-page cutline. One story is about women in the engineering fields—it seems that the few women with engineering degrees seem to prefer to teach (almost all male) students than doing any engineering in the field themselves. The other story is about three female U.S. Senators who the paper claims are taking “charge” to break the shutdown of the federal government. While I appreciate anything approaching common sense coming out of Congress, I checked CNN’s website and there is no mention of any such power surge or the senators in question, only that House Republicans continue to be held hostage by the Tea Party.

But I’m not concerned about propaganda to sell a newspaper. The media’s failure has been far more acute in the way it has disseminated the Affordable Care Act to the public, particularly the insurance exchange program. We get horror stories about the federal website, which has to service the mostly “red” states that refused to set-up their own enrollment websites. We get stories in TIME from Kate Pickert, who claims that the ACA is a “failure” because the people most in need of affordable health insurance have not been adequately informed in how to acquire its services. Who do I blame for that? People who are either too lazy or deliberately uninformed to educate themselves on the matter for one, but mostly I blame the media—both in print and broadcast—for preferring to disseminate partisan attacks on “Obamacare” rather than educate people on what is actually a simple and straightforward procedure to enroll.

So much of what is disseminated never addresses the failures of the current health care delivery system, and the way costs have been spiraling out of control because of its failure to provide affordable preventative care for all citizens—rather forcing those without insurance or poor insurance that is rejected by general practitioners to get so sick that they need to go to the emergency room. I was talking to a native of India who told me of that country’s poorest people availing themselves to health care that is free. He is of two minds about the ACA, understanding how the current model denies health care to those without insurance, yet worried about taxes. Yet free health care is not really “free” even in India; health care providers still have to be paid from some source, and that is likely taxes. 

Many of the complaints I hear in the media and right-wing politicians show a remarkable lack of empathy for people who want and need health insurance that has previously been out of reach. Why do they never stop and consider the needs of people who don’t have the good fortune of being an over-paid radio jockey who only works a few hours a day? Why is only the opinion of people who society has decided should possess the greater portion of the national largesse (whether they actually do or not)  being heard? Where are the people who speak for the rest of us?  

The fact of the matter is that where the Affordable Care Act has been fully embraced, it has every appearance of being a success, making it harder for the Republicans and their allies in the media to justify killing it without exposing themselves as inhuman and insensitive to the needs of millions of people.  In the state of Washington, the ACA is shaping up to be a great success, mainly because the state took its responsibilities to its citizens seriously. The Washington Healthplanfinder website disseminated a press release announcing that 25,000 residents have enrolled for health coverage, with another 37,000 completing online applications. “We’re pleased to see that Medicaid enrollments are continuing their strong trend,” said Dorothy Teeter, Director of the Health Care Authority. “The bulk of those enrollments are the newly eligible – with children also enrolling at a good pace.”

The media has chosen not to report stories like this; in doing so, it causing great disservice to the public—and playing to tune of right-wing extremists.

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