It’s still unclear whether Democrats will engineer a squeak-through finish for the massive healthcare reform package, or not.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And journalists are, at least in large measure, culpable.<\/p>\n
How come? <\/p>\n
Because we participated in a nearly year-long scream fest that embraced all the talk-show theatrics without explaining or humanizing the real issues.<\/p>\n
The fact is that leaving 40 million Americans uninsured is devastating our economy.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The current system isn’t just unfair and immoral; it’s also teetering toward implosion. <\/p>\n
This bill is a clumsy, special-interest driven effort to wrestle with some of those problems. It’s not smart enough or effective enough.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
The simple truth is that modern journalism isn’t very well equipped to talk about an issue this complex.<\/p>\n
Healthcare brings together nearly every controversial issue of our time in one thorny package.<\/p>\n
Rather than sort through it and help our audiences understand, we obsessed over Sarah Palin’s tweets. <\/p>\n
Another of the nonsense narratives peddled by reporters is that this fight has been surprisingly hard, or bungled, or mismanaged.<\/p>\n
As if every other big battle — over civil rights, say — hadn’t been just as messy.<\/p>\n
This is what big problems, and big debates, look like in functioning democracy. <\/p>\n
It’s slow, it’s clumsy and we as a society don’t always get it right the first time.<\/p>\n
That story is harder to tell. It’s ambiguous, made up of shades of gray rather than good vs. evil.<\/p>\n
But it’s also more interesting, more human, and more true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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