As I was driving home, I was listening to NPR's Marketplace. Of course the discussion was all about Obama's (rockin') speech last night. I tuned in because I had been in meetings all day and was craving a good political fix. Lo and behold their expert was
John Shields is with the Lewin Group, a non-partisan health consulting firm.
That's right - The Lewin Group
Not surprisingly Mr. Shields concluded that the Obama plan was not sustainable
JOHN SHIELDS: Their bill is pretty much fully paid for in the first 10 years.
Buuuut...
SHIELDS: The following decade, we would increase the deficit by about a trillion dollars for the program.
At this point I switched to my music station.
In case you haven't heard -The Lewin group is basically a front organization for United Health Care. Rachel Maddow has covered them extensively.
I did come home intending to give NPR a piece of my mind and to read the transcript.
I guess a few people beat me to it. I'm going to go back to add my own, but I was hoping I could encourage a few more comments from Kossaks -so far 100% of their comments on this story are about the Lewin Group.
Here are a few:
Well, it has already been well stated here, but I was just floored when I heard Ms. Keith characterize the Lewin Group as non-partisan. Just go to their website. Here is the real story: The Lewin Group is an Ingenix company. Ingenix, a wholly-owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, was founded in 1996 to develop, acquire and integrate the world's best-in-class health care information technology capabilities. For more information, visit www.ingenix.com. The Lewin Group operates with editorial independence and provides its clients with the very best expert and impartial health care and human services policy research and consulting services. The Lewin Group is anything but non-partisan. Marketplace cannot make blunders like that and keep even a shred of its credibility in the future.
I used to depend on Marketplace for information it was difficult to get elsewhere. NO MORE. Your credibility is nil, since you identified the Lewin Group as a "non-partisan" consulting group. Why didn't you tell the truth? How is it possible that you did not know that United Healthcare, the biggest health insurance corporation in the country, owns The Lewin Group? American Public Media and National Public Radio have both been permanently damaged by your ignorant and dangerous error. And to think, I used to recommend Marketplace to people. Never again. Tamara Keith and the entire team at Marketplace, you have taught me my lesson.
Wow! Tamara Keith "checking out a few of [Obama's] claims and calling the Lewin Group "non-partisan." Being wholly owned by UnitedHealth Group and a mouthpiece for the health insurance industry, the Lewin Group shouldn't even be appearing in a fact-checking story, let alone be called non-partisan. I think that Marketplace can do much better than Tamara Keith's silly reporting.
I know NPR has swung hard to the right since Obama won the election, and Marketplace has always been biased, but this is too much even for them.
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