Banner headline.
Decent lead.
Health Care Looms as Top Campaign Issue
WASHINGTON, July 5 — There is no better measure of the power of the health care issue than this: Sixteen months before Election Day, presidential candidates in both parties are promising to overhaul the system and cover more — if not all — of the 44.8 million people without insurance.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Newpaper of record.
Finally, something to sink our teeth into . . .
Not so quick.
If this is a taste of how The New York Times is going to report on the most critical domestic issue of our time, we're going to have our hand full around here.
Robin Toner intrepid New York Times stenographer reporting for duty. She lives to report the news.
Today she wants us to know that Republicans believe the market is capbale of responding to the collapse of the American healthcare system. Democrats will raise your taxes to fund their overhaul of our catastrophic healthcare disaster. Yawn.
Bless her for explaining to my ignorant mind that the Republican approach would be somewhat different from what the Democrats might serve up.
Their approaches are very different, reflecting longstanding divisions between the parties on the role of government versus the private market in addressing the affordability and availability of health insurance. Republicans, by and large, promise to expand coverage by using a variety of tax incentives to empower consumers to buy it themselves, from private insurers. Conservatives warn, repeatedly, of Democrats edging toward the slippery slope of "government-controlled health insurance," as former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York puts it, and tout the innovation and choice offered by private insurers.
It gets better worse. Here's what I know a lot of you will find especially galling.
The guy with the best (though not perfect) plan, John Edwards, is given a back seat.
It took her until paragraph 17, deep on page 2 (I read this fine reporting on the on-line edition) to even mention John Edwards. And the Edwards reference comes as an aside. A fucking afterthought.
This year, the major Democratic proposals — including Mr. Obama’s, one from former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and a plan expected from Mrs. Clinton — are arguably ambitious and costly, but do not attempt the wholesale reinvention of the system, or move explicitly toward the government takeover Republicans so often predict.
Mostly, this was the New York Times being the New York Times. At best regurgitating Democratic and Republican talking points, at worse, reporting misinformation, as fact.
For example, I wasn't aware of this. Senator Clinton is tripping all over herself to reveal her plan?
Democrats are competing furiously among themselves over who has the bigger, better plan to control costs and to approach universal coverage — a striking change from the party’s wariness on the issue a decade ago after the collapse of the Clintons’ health care initiative.
I wasn't aware of this either. Democrats are watching how it goes in Massachusetts where many citizens are being offered "affordable" junk health insurance. Affordable is often a political weasel word synonymous with High Deductible junk insurance.
And if Ms. Toner is right and I'm wrong, we're in big trouble because the Massachusetts Mandate the way it's presently constructed, isn't my idea of guaranteed universal healthcare.
Did y'all know that even if Democrats sweep to victory in 2008 we'll have to accept a "centrist compromise?"
You bet, that's what the New York Times says.
And both parties are closely watching the action in the states as potential blueprints for a centrist compromise, especially in Massachusetts, which just began a major plan aimed at requiring every individual to have insurance.
Finally some information to set your hair on fire--from the great people at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
This amount of attention, this early, comes in response to the growing anxiety among voters — and much of American business — about the cost of health care. Premiums for family coverage have risen by 87 percent since 2000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The number of Americans without insurance has grown steadily, to what the Census Bureau estimates as nearly 45 million, from 37 million when the Clintons first confronted the issue.
As you read this reporting, you'll get a preview of what we can expect going forward. You will understand one thing--that healthcare is going to be high stakes poker in the 2008 election.
But Mr. Gruber and all these politicians and "journalists" can count on an army of dedicated and devoted bloggers. We will straighten out their misinformation, distortion and errors. We weren't around in 1993-1994, but we'll be working 24/7 to get the truth out.
By the time the general election rolls around, polls indicate that the issue will be front and center, setting the stage for another great battle to overhaul the system under the next president. Veterans of the Clinton administration say it all feels very familiar.
"If the Democrats win, it will be very hard not to take this issue on," said Mr. Gruber, who is helping to implement the Massachusetts plan. "It will be as promising as it was in the early 1990s."
There is some good news, we have the netroots. Blogs didn’t exist in 1993 and 1994. Even in the face of a salvo of falsehoods, more and more of us are learning the truth and uniting across racial, ethnic, gender, income, and class lines in the most concerted effort in the nation’s history to build a public mandate for quality, guaranteed, affordable, single-payer health care.