Analysis Of Media Health Care Debate

Image: Robin Eley

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Trudy Lieberman, who monitors media coverage of the presidential candidates’ health-care proposals, recently gave a gold star to the Associated Press. The A.P. filed an accurate description of Barack Obama’s general approach. The Democratic candidate is not for socialized or nationalized medicine, nor is he for universal coverage. He’s for “universal access to medical coverage” for America’s 47 million uninsured and the 25 million regarded as underinsured.

To Lieberman, who runs the graduate journalism program in health and medical reporting at the City University of New York, this coverage is a rare bright spot in a year marked by outdated terminology and simplistic “stenographic” accounts of the nation’s No. 1 domestic problem. “The truth,” she concluded after examining coverage of John McCain’s health-care proposals, is that the media has been “M.I.A. on this one.”

She’s not alone in taking this dim view. On his website, Health Business Blog, MedPharma Partners co-founder David Williams summarized Lieberman’s work, noting that the press “stuck to making dry comparisons of the candidates’ wonkish proposals without delving into the implications for everyday people.” For Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, an unpaid health-care adviser to John McCain, the reporting on McCain’s plan to radically alter the group insurance system that covers 177 million Americans has been “factually presented, but without any amount of analysis.”

In sum, overall expert opinion is that media coverage of the $2.7 trillion industry that touches—or neglects—every American life has been sparse, shallow, and timid. It’s worth noting that Lieberman, whose columns appear in the moderately liberal Columbia Journalism Review, assigns her students writings by Herzlinger, a free-market conservative she’s never met. To me, that symbolizes the degree to which the intellectual debate over health-care reform has left both the press and the politicians in the dust. The general public, relying on newspapers and television, is being led to think that two huge unanswered questions loom over this campaign: (1) Will the government regulate and control health care? and (2) How much tax money will be doled out to low-income families?

In fact, the answers are already in. They are yes and a hell of a lot. Although the public seems largely unaware, policy wonks on both the left and the right have been moving for a long time toward a realists’ consensus on those issues. The candidates know this too—or at least they’re being told by their staffs what it will take to produce anything approaching decent coverage for all Americans, regardless of income. But Obama has been cautious about admitting how strong the government’s role will have to be, and McCain can’t speak plainly about the radical nature of his plan to eliminate employer-funded health insurance as the mainstay of financing health care.

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