skippy the bush kangaroo

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

dana bash and lesa jansen at cnn carry water for the insurance lobby

so i take my rare look at cnn.com today (i don't go there often because it is really an untrustworthy news organization) and i find this article on health care reform and canada's health care system, which is merely right out of the insurance lobby primer on health care reform.

hey dana and lesa, why are you buying into the insurance industry's framing? why don't you mention that the world health organization rates canada's health care system 30th in the world...and the u.s. system is rated 37th? why don't you look at the countries that have a better health care system than the u.s. or canada, like norway, france, germany, great britain, etc., and see how they fund health care (here's a hint: they generally have a single payer system).

dana and lesa, do you have internet access? can you get to wikipedia? if you just looked up a comparison of u.s. and canadian health care systems on wikipedia you'd find that canada has a much lower health care cost than the u.s., both per capita and as a percentage of gross national product. is it too much trouble to actually do some research rather than retype a lobbyist pamphlet? is it too "thinky" for you?

from that same wikipedia article (which references its sources, by the way, unlike the cnn.com piece):
in 2006, per-capita spending for health care in the u.s. was $6,714; in canada, $3,678.
that's $3,000 per person. if i were writing an article comparing health care in the u.s. and canada, with cost being such a huge part of the debate on health care reform, i would probably include the comparative cost of health care in those two countries, but then i'm not a reporter for cnn.com, so i don't have to answer to anybody's interests.

while discussing wait times for medical services in canada, why didn't dana and lesa look at wait times in the u.s.? the same wikipedia article i cited above compares wait times in some detail and...surprise! the u.s. doesn't do that much better than canada in a bunch of circumstances and does worse in others. but then a fair treatment of the story isn't so interesting to dana and lesa, is it?

why is cnn.com publishing articles that pretend to compare health care in the u.s. and canada, but ignore significant facts? and why are dana bash and lesa jansen still working as reporters?
posted by DBK at 9:40 AM |

1 Comments:

How much advertising on CNN comes from pharmaceutical companies? They'll have a similar interest to that of the insurance companies (and probably work in tandem with them on this issue).
commented by Blogger daveawayfromhome, 7:06 PM PDT  

Add a comment