How journalism has failed the healthcare bill

It’s still unclear whether Democrats will engineer a squeak-through finish for the massive healthcare reform package, or not.

What’s clear is that it is a deeply flawed bill, one that doesn’t do enough to contain costs, contain the ridiculous behavior of the insurance industry, or shift care to more effective (and low-cost) preventative medicine.

And journalists are, at least in large measure, culpable.

How come?

Because we participated in a nearly year-long scream fest that embraced all the talk-show theatrics without explaining or humanizing the real issues.

The fact is that leaving 40 million Americans uninsured is devastating our economy.

It’s also clear that with an aging population of baby boomers, we have to find ways to deliver better care to more people more efficiently.

The current system isn’t just unfair and immoral; it’s also teetering toward implosion.

This bill is a clumsy, special-interest driven effort to wrestle with some of those problems. It’s not smart enough or effective enough.

But rather than tell that story, reporters indulged the sport of bandying flat-out lies (death panels), distortions (this bill represents a government ‘take-over’ of health care) and hypocrisy (Republicans blasting the public option while defending Medicare).

Journalists also suckered for simplistic arguments from the left, accepting the idea that a vast new entitlement could be created without sharply controlling costs and limiting benefits.

A lot of reporters also echoed the fiction that the public option — or some comparable form of ‘single-payer’ coverage — is the only effective step forward.

The simple truth is that modern journalism isn’t very well equipped to talk about an issue this complex.

Healthcare brings together nearly every controversial issue of our time in one thorny package.

Rather than sort through it and help our audiences understand, we obsessed over Sarah Palin’s tweets.

Another of the nonsense narratives peddled by reporters is that this fight has been surprisingly hard, or bungled, or mismanaged.

As if every other big battle — over civil rights, say — hadn’t been just as messy.

This is what big problems, and big debates, look like in functioning democracy.

It’s slow, it’s clumsy and we as a society don’t always get it right the first time.

That story is harder to tell. It’s ambiguous, made up of shades of gray rather than good vs. evil.

But it’s also more interesting, more human, and more true.