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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