President Barack Obama's top legislative priority this summer may also be his most contentious. Health care reform, currently under intense debate in Congress, has drawn far-reaching media coverage and commentary in the past month, little of which suggests an easy or quick path forward for lawmakers or the president.
For two weeks, from June 29 through July 12, our community focused on how the news media covered the health care debate. We devoted our first week to finding the best coverage (read last week's post here) -- then we compared coverage from independent sources, blogs, as well as liberal and conservative pundits. Disagreement marked most of the stories we compared. Carrying a price tag as high as $1.2 trillion and involving issues of personal choice, business regulation and human rights, health care reform has quickly become a defining challenge for the Obama Administration.
As was the case in the first week of our News Hunt, most of our top stories featuring health care were opinions. We gave equal space to opinions from the right and left, and our community favored the liberal or progressive perspectives on health care to those taking a conservative or libertarian view. More noteworthy, however, were vastly different and often contradictory arguments in these pieces.
Writing in the American Thinker, Frank Rosenbloom, a physician, said health care reform in Massachusetts enacted in 2006 has "failed miserably" (NT reviews). "We will likely have to consider the morgue as an integral part of any government health care system in the future," Rosenbloom concluded. The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn, however, maintained (NT reviews) that criticisms of the state's reforms are premature at best. Cohn sought to debunk a video op-ed from the conservative publication National Review that blamed reforms for increasing waiting periods and insurance costs. In reality, he said, wait times and costs were high long before reforms took place.
A similar clash of perspectives cropped up between a Wall Street Journal editorial and a blog post from Obsidian Wings. The Journal claimed (NT reviews) that Obama's health care reform plan could result in a government "rationing" of services not unlike the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). "Mr. Obama and Democrats claim they can expand subsidies for tens of millions of Americans, while saving money and improving the quality of care," it read. "It can't possibly be done. The inevitable result of their plan will be some version of a NICE board that will tell millions of Americans that they are too young, or too old, or too sick to be worth paying to care for."
Hilary Bok (aka Hilzoy) argued (NT reviews) the opposite on Obsidian Wings:
"When some people talk about rationing, they mean something scarier: the idea that someone, possibly the government, allocates quantities of something, and forbids anyone to obtain more of it. Thus, if the government rations gasoline in wartime, you get your gas coupons, and you are not allowed to buy any more gasoline, period. (That's why black markets are illegal.) Likewise, when reselling tickets is illegal, ticket vendors are, in this sense, rationing tickets.
"No one -- no one -- is proposing to ration health care in this way. Not Barack Obama, not Bernie Sanders, no one. Every serious proposal I'm aware of would allow people to purchase whatever health care they want, so long as a doctor is willing to prescribe it. And not only that, they can purchase supplemental insurance, like those add-on plans for Medicare."
The Weekly Standard's Gary Andres and the Washington Post's Ezra Klein both commented on public support for health care reform, but arrived at different conclusions in their stories. Andres, citing contradictory polls, said "
fear and loathing" (
NT reviews) explain most citizens' views of health care reform -- fear of changing their care and loathing toward the government that could do so. "People might see some gains in reforming the overall system, but fear of changing what they have counts more," Andres said. "And while open to promises of health reform, they're concerned the government might mess things up."
Klein, blogging for the Post, took a
different view (
NT reviews) -- polls suggest "ambivalence" among Americans toward Obama's health care bill, he said:
health-care reform isn't simply suffering because the public is overly opposed to some of its revenue raisers. It's suffering because the public is insufficiently supportive of its core ... This isn't terribly surprising: it's not obvious what health-care reform will do for the average American ... The hope was that Americans would be convinced that their health-care coverage wouldn't change for the worse. But that's also made it hard to explain why it will get better.
As Congress presses forward on health care reform, we'll continue to monitor news coverage of the debate on our
Health Care topic page. Can Democrats in the House and Senate negotiate a bipartisan health care reform bill before the August recess? If not, how great of a setback will it be for the Obama Administration? Help us find quality news and opinion that address these questions and more -- and be sure to
review or
submit a health care story in coming days, so your vote can be counted.
Check out or full listings of stories from our two-week News Hunt on Health Care:
Health Care: top rated storiesHealth Care: most recent stories
Thanks again to
Kristin Gorski, who did a fantastic job hosting our Health Care News Hunt, while also working on NewsTrust's upcoming News Literacy Guide. We're grateful to have her as an active reviewer, host and now team member. We'd also like to acknowledge a few reviewers who offered their expertise and unique perspectives on our Health Care stories and more. Special thanks go to
Patricia Blochowiak, who co-hosted this News Hunt,
Sam W. Velsor IV, and
Fred Gatlin, who helped surface and rate many great news and opinion pieces on the health care debate.
This Week: The Republican PartyThis week our featured topic is the Republican Party. Facing low approval ratings, losses in the 2008 elections and controversy about its rising stars, the GOP is struggling to regain political power. What will it take for the Republicans to rebound? Can the party reinvent itself while continuing to challenge President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress? We're looking for great news and opinion of all political stripes on the Republican Party. Join our news hunt -- and compare stories on our special
Republican Party page.
-- Derek Hawkins, with Joey Baker, Fabrice Florin and Kaizar Campwala
