Commentary—

Media Blackout On Single-Payer Health Care

By Isabel MacDonald

Major newspaper, broadcast and cable stories rarely mention the idea of a single-payer national health insurance program, according to a new FAIR study. And advocates of such a system — two of whom participated in this month’s summit — were almost entirely shut out.

Single-payer — a model in which health care delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much as Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada’s current system) — polls well with the public, who preferred it 2 to 1 over a privatized system in a recent New York Times/CBS poll. But a media consumer in the week leading up to President Barack Obama’s March 5 health care summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major US newspaper.

In the week leading up the summit, hundreds of stories in major newspapers and on NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer mentioned health care reform, according to a search of the Nexis database (2/25/09–3/4/09). Yet all but 18 of these stories made no mention of “single-payer” (or synonyms commonly used by its proponents, such as “Medicare for all,” or the single-payer bill, HR 676), and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer — none of which appeared on television.

Of a total of the ten newspaper columns FAIR found that mentioned single-payer, Krauthammer’s syndicated column critical of the concept, published in the Washington Post (2/27/09) and reprinted in four other daily newspapers, accounted for five instances. Only three columns in the study period advocated for a single-payer system.

The FAIR study turned up only three mentions of single-payer on the TV outlets surveyed, and two of those references were by TV guests who expressed strong disapproval of it: conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and Republican Representative Darrell Issa of California.

In many newspapers, the only argument in favor of the policy has been made in letters to the editor.

In contrast, the terminology of choice for detractors of any greater public-sector role in health care — such as “socialized medicine” and “government-run” health care — turned up seven times on TV, including once on ABC News’ This Week and five times on CNN. CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen has herself adopted this terminology in discussing health care reform, stating that “if in time, Americans start to think what President Obama is proposing is some kind of government-run health system — a la Canada, a la England — he will get resistance in the same way that Hillary Clinton got resistance when she tried to do tried to do this in the 90s.”

Particularly in the absence of actual coverage of single-payer, such rhetoric confuses rather than informs, blurring the differences between the Canadian model of government-administered national health insurance coupled with private health care delivery that single-payer proponents advocate, and health care systems such as Britain’s, in which the government administers health care (and not just health care insurance).

The views of CNN’s senior medical correspondent notwithstanding, opinion polling suggests that the public would actually favor single-payer.

Though more than 60 lawmakers have co-sponsored HR 676, the single-payer bill in Congress, Obama has not expressed support for single-payer; both the idea and its advocates were marginalized in his health care forum. But given the high level of popular support the policy enjoys, that’s all the more reason media should include it in the public debate about the future of healthcare.

(Isabel MacDonald is communications director of FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), the national media watch group that offers well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship.)