Views » October 29, 2009 » Web Only

On Public Option, MSM Gets It Wrong (cont’d)

Loony Idea?

For months now, the MSM has treated the public option as some loony left-wing idea, when actually the concept had a lot going for it, including the Congressional Budget Office’s conclusion that it was the only approach that achieved substantial savings. It also tested well in most opinion polls.

Yet, it still made career sense for congressional correspondents to treat the public option dismissively and side with the so-called moderates in seeking a health-reform law that would compel Americans to buy insurance from private insurers, without a public option – exactly the position favored by the insurance industry. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “US Health Insurers Up the Ante.”]

As CNN’s Bash and other correspondents transformed their “public option is dead” thinking into the media’s conventional wisdom, the voices of actual Democratic lawmakers were largely tuned out when they kept insisting that the public option wasn’t dead.

It wasn’t until this past weekend when the mainstream news media began to make an about-face. On Saturday, Oct. 24, the Washington Post’s lead story was entitled “Prognosis improves for public insurance,” noting that its prospects “have gone in a few short weeks from bleak to bright.”

This reversal of fortune got the attention of the Post’s neocon-dominated editorial page which published a double-barrel attack on the public option on Monday. Both editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt and economic writer Robert Samuelson dusted off the insurance industry’s arguments and repackaged them as their own assaults on the public option.

Hiatt deemed the public option “dangerous” because it supposedly would seek to save money for consumers “without controlling costs” through unpopular ideas like taxing the health benefits of Americans or tightening reimbursement rules for Medicare.

However, later in the column, Hiatt went after the public option because it may use “government power to demand lower prices from hospitals and drug companies” and thus “those providers may lower quality or seek to make up the difference from private payers,” leading to a situation where “we could end up with only the public option.”

Curiously, Hiatt then wrote that “single-payer national health insurance may be the best outcome, but we should get there after an honest debate, not through the back door.” Of course, it’s hard to recall the Washington Post editorial page doing much to lead such “an honest debate.”

The internal contradictions of Hiatt’s column suggest that his real goal – as with many other neocons – is simply to see President Barack Obama fail. Their own “back door” strategy appears to be crippling Obama over his top domestic priority and thus hobbling his ability to challenge hawkish neocon positions on Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Similarly, Samuelson, a longtime staple of the Post’s editorial page who may rank as one of the nation’s dimmest-witted economic writers, reprised the arguments of private health insurers in concluding that “the promise of the public plan is a mirage.”

The mainstream media’s opposition to the public option – as reflected in the reporting from CNN and other major networks as well as the Washington Post’s columns – is another reminder why honest Americans must do whatever they can to build a truly independent media that will resist pressure from the Right and other powerful vested interests.

This article originally appeared at ConsortiumNews.com