This Week: Community Picks

This week on NewsTrust, we're departing from our tradition of hosting a News Hunt on a featured topic, and focusing instead on the great journalism surfaced by our community, on any topic. We're looking for the best news and opinion you find on the Web, with a focus on reviews and submissions from new members. Our goal is to find what emerges from our own interests, and feature stories that our members rate most highly – or that generate the most reviews.

Review a Story Today
Can you help us rate this week's best stories? Please review some of the stories dug up by your peers, to help us determine which community picks to feature on our home page. We're particularly interested in your reviews on unrated stories (indicated by a gray icon), in our Stories for Review listing.

Share Your Favorite News
Have you come across an excellent news story recently? If so, please share it with us -- and submit it on NewsTrust, using our simple submission tool.

Throughout the week, we will feature your community picks for the week's best journalism on the NewsTrust home page. Next week, we'll list the week’s community picks on our blog, along with our analysis.

First Community Pick
Our first community pick of the week, FactCheck's 'Doctor's Orders,' caps off a three week debate over a controversial op-ed by Betsy McCaughey, former Republican lieutenant governor of New York, which appeared in Bloomberg News Feb. 9. Several NewsTrust editors vetted the piece and were among those who petitioned FactCheck to publish its own analysis, which concluded that the Bloomberg opinion piece contained falsehoods.

McCaughey's op-ed, 'Ruin your health with the Obama stimulus plan', warned that the Obama Administration's stimulus bill would allow a dangerous expansion of the government's role in monitoring and providing health care, and put doctor-patient relationships at risk. "[T]he bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry," she wrote. "Imagine limiting growth and innovation in the electronics or auto industry during this downturn. This stimulus is dangerous to your health and the economy."

The claim raised questions among many readers, including of our editors, who took issue with the way McCaughey cited evidence and interpreted key provisions of the bill. Several members of our team took it upon themselves to investigate her arguments. Walter Cox emailed McCaughey directly asking for more information on the passages of the bill she used in her critique. He joined Mike LaBonte, Beth Wellington, Marsha Iverson, Dan Kennedy, Jim Lang and Dale Penn in scrutinizing McCaughey's citations and seeking outside perspectives to compare to her conclusions.

Their work brought a host of new information to light and helped us arrive at a consensus on McCaughey's piece. We found that McCaughey had indeed exaggerated many of the claims in her op-ed. We endorse FactCheck's analysis as fair, factual and accurate.

At issue were her assertions that Obama's bill would create a "new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology." The office, she wrote, would allow the government to interfere with doctors' decisions, "ration" health care to seniors, and screen treatments for cost effectiveness. In fact, the office was created in 2004 under George W. Bush; Obama's bill only called for funding for the office. The bill, now law, did not call for any "rationing" and contained no language about monitoring for "cost effectiveness."

McCaughey and Bloomberg News were also remiss in disclosing relevant background about McCaughey and her affiliations. McCaughey is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative interest group whose funders include several major pharmaceutical companies. Furthermore, in 1994 McCaughey criticized then President Bill Clinton's health care initiative in an article in the New Republic, for which she received the National Magazine Award for public interest. Much of the article was later debunked, prompting an apology and a retraction from the magazine. This constituted a conflict of interest that the author and the news organization should have made clear up front.

Walter Cox spoke at length with McCaughey, and adjusted his original review of her piece. Here is his reaction to their conversation:

I wish to acknowledge that various editors and reviewers at NewsTrust were correct that McCaughey’s concerns were overstated.  It is not clear to me, however, that she was guilty of intellectual dishonesty when she penned her opinion piece.

I interviewed Betsy McCaughey on February 19, 2009, and she spent a full hour going over specific points of her Bloomberg piece.  What became immediately clear is that  McCaughey is no Republican hack intent on sabotaging the Obama initiative to create a national healthcare system.  In fact she is a registered Democrat who supported Obama’s run for the presidency and voted for him in the national election. She also is in favor of creating a national healthcare system, perhaps one modeled on the WHO-acclaimed French version.  I am convinced that the concerns she voiced in the Bloomberg piece were sincere and were informed by experience garnered during the 1990’s serving as Lieutenant Governor of the State of New York (she was a Republican at that time).  Specifically her sensibilities revolve around New York’s battle to outlaw what are called “withholds” in the health insurance industry.   What she noticed in the House version of the stimulus bill was language that closely resembles the language insurance companies traditionally use to penalize physicians who do not toe their line when it comes to their recommended patient treatment protocols.

Nevertheless, McCaughey clearly overstated her case in the Bloomberg piece.  She claimed a relationship between the language of the bill and direct government interference in the physician/patient relationship, when in fact such interference is but a distant possibility.   In the end some good came out of her efforts, because the final version of the bill contains safeguards that did not exist in the original House version; those safeguards would not have been added had she not pointed out potential dangers inherent in the bill’s original language.  In my opinion her distortions were not necessary in order to accomplish this good, and her loss of credibility following publication of the Bloomberg piece has been well earned.

Mike LaBonte remarked on the value of evaluating a story as controversial as this one, especially when it could have a far reaching impact.

A lot of digging has taken place around this story. We read bills and articles, and Walter took the initiative to interview a key player. The question that comes to my mind is "What does it mean for NewsTrust?"  A controversial issue came up, we tried to find the best journalism on the subject, and in the end the truth fell somewhere in the middle.

If you like this first community pick, help us find another by reviewing and submitting quality journalism this week.

Join Our Search
Can you help us find some of the best news and opinion on the Web this week? To get started, be sure to Log In (if you’re already a member) or Sign Up (if you’re not a member yet). Then dive right in, and review some of the unrated stories submitted by other members like you.

And if you’ve come across a great article lately, be sure to share it with us by clicking on the ‘Submit’ button at the top right corner of any page on our site.

-- By Derek Hawkins, with Fabrice Florin and Kaizar Campwala

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