Fairer Coverage of Health Care Debate

I was pleasantly surprised to wake up this morning to a different tenor in the N&O’s health care coverage. Instead of the artificially balanced, blood-seeking articles we’ve seen of late, there were several stories and columns providing fact-based, non-sensationalized assessments of the real issues underlying the problems with our nation’s current health care system.

The paper led with an above-the-fold story about the Republican Congressional leadership’s unwillingness to compromise on any reasonable health care proposal and why Democrats might be forced to pass needed reform legislation alone. The article focuses on how the so-called consensus-building moderates in the party are not participating meaningfully in the discussion and continue to peddle heinous falsehoods about the proposed legislation, including the lie that they include “death panels.”

The lead story in the State & Co. section highlighted yesterday’s Families USA report which found health care costs in North Carolina rising five times faster than wages. The report found that family coverage inflation had been especially drastic, rising 145% from 2000-2009.

And on today’s Op-Ed page there were three good opinion pieces that illustrated in different ways—for the poor, for the affluent, and for the elderly—why our current health care system is fundamentally broken and in need of reform.

Gene Nichol, director of the Center for Poverty and Opportunity and UNC-Chapel Hill, wrote about the devastating human cost of our nation’s for-profit, make shift health care system. He told the story of the thousands who showed up for treatment at a free clinic in Los Angeles, the tens of millions of uninsured and underinsured who have nowhere to turn for care, and a health care system that produces misery and devastation that rivals conditions in the Third World.

Froma Harrop, an editor at the Providence Journal, wrote about her experience with health care rationing from the private insurance industry. Treatment for her husband’s cancer was delayed for months because of insurance company stalling and indecisiveness, only coming in the end because of her connections to powerful people in the company. If someone with good health insurance in a well-connected position can’t get good health care in the private system, then who can? As she writes,

“death panels” already exist, and they have nothing to do with the government.”

And finally, the N&O printed a piece from the precociously syndicated NYTimes columnist Ross Douthat about how conservatives should support measures to control the cost of Medicare (instead of inflaming seniors’ fears with incendiary remarks) because the program’s projected future costs threaten the fiscal integrity of the federal government. He writes:

Medicare’s price tag, if trends continue, will make a mockery of the idea of limited government.