For coverage of our delivery of FAIR’s ongoing petition demanding that the TV networks cover proposals for a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system to ABC News‘ NYC studio, you can tune into Democracy Now!–a media outlet that could teach the networks a thing or two about how to contribute to, rather than interfere with, the public debate on healthcare reform.
If the public has managed to get any TV news at all about single-payer, or to hear the perspectives of the large numbers of physicians and citizens who support this proposal, it is thanks to outlets like DN! and shows like the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.
Given that 59 percent of the public, and an equal percentage of physicians, support single-payer, according to recent polls, one would think that the inclusion of this proposal in the media debate would be a no-brainer for any self-respecting journalist.
After all, we hear so much about the soaring costs of U.S. healthcare and the tens of millions of uninsured Americans, and we know that single-payer systems have been successful in keeping healthcare costs down, while providing broad universal coverage, in other industrialized countries.
There is a word for what Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman and PBS‘ Bill Moyers are doing when they interview some of the many prominent medical professionals who favor single-payer–people like doctors Quentin Young and David Himmelstein of Physicians for a National Health Program.
Journalism is what many people would call it.
Yet the practice stands in marked contrast to what’s been going on at ABC, where FAIR, Healthcare Now!, Physicians for a National Health Program, the Private Health Insurance Must Go coalition, and the Raging Grannnies delivered our petition on Tuesday, signed by over 12,500 people including filmmaker Michael Moore, former MSNBC host Phil Donohue, and actors Mike Farrell, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.
As we pointed out to the ABC representative sent to receive the petitions, ABC has not had one single-payer advocate on air all year.
I recently had the chance to ask ABC‘s Senior VP of Communications Jeffrey Schneider about why the network had disinvited Obama’s longtime physician Dr. David Scheiner from its recent healthcare forum, where Dr. Scheiner was planning to ask the president a question about healthcare reform.
(Watch FAIR’s video in which Scheiner stated that he believed that he’d been disinvited from the forum because ABC was “afraid” he would ask a question that was more “challenging” than what ABC wanted here, and Democracy Now‘s interview with Scheiner here)
ABC‘s VP Schneider took offense at my question: “To draw some kind of nefarious conclusion is simply ridiculous,” he told me in a phone interview.
Of course, there is a far more accurate term than a “nefarious” plot to explain the systematic exclusion of a popular proposal that major insurance companies and the politicians they back would rather not talk about.
FAIR has always called it “corporate journalism”–the product of a media system in which much of our news is produced by powerful for-profit corporations, whose interests, through interlocking boards of directors and lucrative advertizing contracts, often closely overlap with those of other powerful corporations–including the insurance and pharmaceutical companies that have the most to gain from keeping single-payer off the table.
Now more than ever–as single-payer activists march in DC today to commemorate the anniversary of Medicare–it is essential that we oppose the corporate media’s interference in the public debate that is so urgently needed if we are to really address America’s broken healthcare system.
It is not too late to sign onto FAIR’s petition, and help us spread the word about it, before we deliver it to the other TV networks, which a FAIR study found have a similarly dismal record when it comes to stonewalling discussion of single-payer.
Already, we’ve managed to create quite a buzz about the media’s sick healthcare coverage, and yesterday, the LA Times wrote about out petition delivery, and acknowledged that single-payer represents a “gaping hole” in the media’s healthcare coverage.
We now have over 13,000 signatures on the petition. Let’s step up the pressure and see what can be acheived with 20,000 on board.
It looks like it’s going to take a massive grass roots effort to finally demonstrate to Bacchus and the rest of the Congressional deities and White House supreme beings that single-payer is not “off the table” until we the people say so.
This corporate takeover of the news is bad enough, but joined with the censorship of our healthcare debate, the privileged circle of governing elite have overstepped even their bloated sense of entitlement!
Thank you FAIR! You’re the real thing. Now for the pushback.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/30-9
I’ve signed the thing, but I don’t think it’s going to do much good until there’s a commitment to making clear that not only is there a moral imperative involved here, but that we have a *legal right* to universal quality healthcare.
That right came into being over sixty years ago, when the US signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which made its tenets the law of the land, according to the Constitution.
Article 25 states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
Can’t be much plainer than that, right? So why isn’t this the cornerstone of this fight? I’m not being Pollyanna about this – those in power don’t give a damn that we’re legally entitled, of course.
But very few persons in this country know this – and I think that informing them of it could sway even more folks to support single payer, don’t you?
The only way to know is to give it a shot.
Time, and lives, are wasting.
Doug,
We do all have the “right to a standard of living”, but Article 25 does not mandate, nor does it state that you have a legal right to “universal” quality healthcare, only that access to healthcare is available, which it is. Your argument assumes that people in this country are somehow denied these rights, when in fact they are not. Anyone in need of medical care will be treated, as is the law in our country, and in all countries that have signed on to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration does not say anything about paying for those things.
A Single Payer system is not an end-all answer. Too many single payer systems in the world have begun to crumble under the pressure to maintain “quality healthcare” in an environment where the number of doctors has diminished greatly due to reduced wages, and that only people with private insurance can get fast, quality healthcare without waiting in line with people who have chosen to go with a government rationed health plan. And believe me, rationing is exactly what will happen here, and if you can show me one example where it hasn’t happened, please do because I would love to be wrong on that one.
What are the benefits of a single payer system to the small business owner who is now going to be mandated to provide coverage or be fined? This whole argument is a tramp on our liberties as individuals. I am not responsible for my neighbors poor lifestyle if he chose to eat crap, never exercise and sit in front of his TV all day. He deserves to die of a heartattack. Now on the other side, a single working mother in need of healthcare for herself or her children is a different story, and she is provided for under our current system with Medicare, and a host of children’s insurance programs offered at the state level. Our constitution was based on the rights of the individual, not the collective population. Mandating a government healthcare program is an act of socialist wealth redistribution. You chose to not go to school or get a decent job, so now you want a handout from me after I busted my ass through 8 years of school so I could make a living and pay for the best doctors and insurance money can by? You could have done the same thing, and now that you realize your mistake, you want a personal bailout with my money? You want the government to make me pay more because I was responsible and worked hard? Let me ask you this, would you be willing to pay 10% of your income in addition to the average 24% you are probably paying now for health care? That means that just $0.10 of every $1 would be gone to healthcare. Sounds reasonable right? But that option was rejected because it’s somehow not fair to tax people that make less than a congressmen. Funny how the tax increases are all for people that make just over the congressional pay rate of $174,000. When asked if they would be willing to drop the tax increase threshold to include everyone making $150,000, they went nuts because then they themselves would have to be paying for what they are trying to sell.
The bottom line is that no one in this country is denied healthcare. The issue at large is who should be paying for it, and if our congressmen really think they have the answers, then why are so few willing to sign on to the program they are billing as good for the rest of us? Call your congressman and ask them if they have signed on to H. R. 615. That should tell you a lot about where their loyalties are. All it says is that if they sign the bill, they will forgo their congressional healthcare plan (which is provided by a private insurance company by the way) and sign on to the new government plan they are drafting. Not one Democrat has signed on. And they have conveniently left themselves a way out right in the bill. They have included a congressional exemption so they don’t have to use the program themselves.
Instead of trying to bully some BS healthcare plan through, congress needs to take care of the programs that we already have that are not working, ie. Medicare and Medicaid. Once they can prove that they can run those two systems, then we can talk about a “universal” program.
Danny
Danny, every industrialized nation in the world has some form of single payer system – and they all have higher satisfaction rates than the US. You could look it up.
As for what Congress is pimping, it don’t got diddley to do with single payer – that’s why folks are pushing this petition. I’m not sure how you missed that.
Finally, Article 25 states that every person has a right to health care “adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family”. If that were the case, there’d be no need for “reform” – real, or the farce this administration is trying to foist upon us – would there?
And you may not give a rat’s ass about other people, but I do – as badly as I carry out that obligation, I do.
I thought I’d pass this along:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/31
I doubt Danny would find it useful, but other folks might.
I would like to know how many mainstream news publications or cable TV networks have even mentioned health insurance whistleblower Wendell Potter, let alone the insurance industry practices and tactics he reveals or the arguments he makes in favor of reform. He has been on Bill Moyers’ Journal and Democracy Now! Anywhere else?
And did you happen to see Mike Tomasky’s piece in The Guardian calling into question the idea that Blue Dog Democrats face electoral peril if they support President Obama’s health reform plans? Instead of that insight, we get an apparently misleading piece from CNN’s John King, “Blue Dogs on constituents’ short leash over health care,” citing ONE vulnerable Democrat.
Mr Roberts,
I just lost my health insurance because I can no longer afford it. How is paying full price for dr visits (I had a $5,000. deductible because that was what I was able to afford),and prescriptions and labwork etc. “Adequate”? And how is it that a 73 yr old woman who lost her husband to cancer is about to lose her home due to the medical bills incurred even though she had health insurance? Tell me how is that adequate? When you say it’s “available” – that’s the only truth – it’s available to those who can AFFORD it!