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Re: What Corporate Media Failed to Learn About Canadian Single-Payer (fwd)

When the founding fathers accepted that there should be an office of the
president, they made a terrible mistake.  It only ends up being a cult of
personality.

 > From: Noelle <noelle>
 > Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2017 17:05:21 -0800 (PST)
 >
 >  > From: FAIR<http://www.fair.org/~fair>
 >  > Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2017 22:49:56 +0000
 >  > 
 >  > by Michael Corcoran
 >  > 
 >  > When it was announced that several journalists would travel with Sen. Bernie 
 >  > Sanders in October for a hospital tour of Canada to learn about its 
 >  > single-payer system, one question immediately sprang to mind:  What would 
 >  > corporate media do to smear universal healthcare this time?
 >  > It is a sad reflection on the state of healthcare reporting in the United 
 >  > States that one can so easily predict how many media outlets will respond to 
 >  > a news event before it even happens.  Yet for many familiar with years of 
 >  > media either ignoring or rejecting the merits of a universal public 
 >  > healthcare systemâ??Canadaâ??s in particularâ??it was hard not to expect 
 >  > dismissiveness and/or mockery from outlets such as the New York Times and 
 >  > Vox, who sent reporters on the tour.
 >  > The results were unsurprising. Vox (10/31/17) used the occasion to explain 
 >  > why single-payer is likely a pipe dream that doesnâ??t fit with American 
 >  > values. Much of the Times article (11/2/17) read like satire aimed at 
 >  > mocking Canada and Sanders.
 >  > New York Times (11/2/17)
 >  > A New York Times ad circulating on Facebook proudly declares: â??
 >  > Evidence-driven reporting. No matter what the subject.â?? Itâ??s a hollow 
 >  > boast to those familiar with the paperâ??s uniformly negative coverage of 
 >  > single-payer, and Margot Sanger-Katzâ??s write-up of Sandersâ?? tour is a 
 >  > glaring example.
 >  > â??What the US Can Learn from Canadian Healthcareâ?? was the title of 
 >  > Sandersâ?? tour-summarizing speech in Toronto. â??But our question is: What 
 >  > did Sen. Sanders learn from his weekend in Canada?â?? Sanger-Katz said. The 
 >  > paper seemed less interested in  what the US could learn about Canadian 
 >  > healthcareâ??even though healthcare is the most pressing concern for 
 >  > American families (Gallup, 6/23/17)â??instead started off with a focus on 
 >  > Sanders himself.
 >  > â??Heâ??s a â??rock star,â??â?? was the article â??Lesson No. 1â?? from the 
 >  > trip.   The United States is in a healthcare crisis, and yet the Times 
 >  > prioritizes anecdotes, such as a story about an airport security guard in 
 >  > Toronto calling Sanders a â??hero,â?? over anything of substance.  The 
 >  > effect is to portray Sanders as some Jonestown-style cult hero, as opposed 
 >  > to a serious policymaker:
 >  > Ed Broadbent, the chairman of the progressive Broadbent Institute, called 
 >  > Mr. Sanders the most important social democrat in North America, even though 
 >  > Mr. Sanders is not a Canadian social democrat, and is not even a 
 >  > particularly powerful member of the Senate.
 >  > Itâ??s odd to â??correctâ?? Broadbent by pointing out that â??Sanders is not 
 >  > a Canadian social democrat,â?? since that claim was never made; that Sanders 
 >  > is a social democrat and in North America would seem to be uncontroversial 
 >  > statements.
 >  > As for Sanders not being â??a particularly powerful member of the Senate,â?? 
 >  > thatâ??s obviously subjective, but itâ??s not the opinion of mainstream 
 >  > Beltway sources (Politico,  5/26/16; The Hill, 9/13/17). Significantly for 
 >  > the topic at hand, he managed to convince 16 other Senators to support a 
 >  > Medicare for All bill, up from zero a few years ago.
 >  > The paper does touch on some policy implications, not all of which are 
 >  > negative. The Times, Lesson No. 2, for instance, is that system is popular 
 >  > among doctors and patients.  â??Several patients told [Sanders] about the 
 >  > comfort that comes from not having to pay for their care directly,â?? the 
 >  > article said, noting that doctors were also largely supportive.
 >  > But outside of noting popular support in Canada, the benefits of 
 >  > single-payer are barely addressed.  The Times, does emphasize flaws, of 
 >  > courseâ??most notably, it declares long waiting times, the most common 
 >  > right-wing/industry attack on the Canadian health system, as â??lesson No. 
 >  > 3.â?? While often exaggerated in the US, itâ??s true that Canada has 
 >  > problems with wait times (CBC News, 2/16/17), ranking well above the 
 >  > international average in the amount of time it takes to see a specialist or 
 >  > have an elected surgery. This, however,  is one of the only metrics in 
 >  > which the United States ranks higher than Canada, according to the 2017 
 >  > Commonwealth Fund report (7/17) on the healthcare systems in 11 wealthy 
 >  > nations.
 >  > A reader of the Timesâ?? report fails to learn that Canadaâ??s universal 
 >  > coverage costs 55 percent what the US system does on a per capita basis. 
 >  > They donâ??t know Canada has better outcomes in key metrics like life 
 >  > expectancy and infant mortality. Waiting times are important, but in the US 
 >  > as many as 45,000 people die each year because they couldnâ??t get care due 
 >  > to a lack of insurance, a problem that doesnâ??t exist in Canada. At least 
 >  > Canadians get to see a doctor at some point, something that 28 million 
 >  > uninsured Americans cannot count on.
 >  > It&#8217;s hard to spin the Commonwealth Fund report (7/17) to make US 
 >  > healthcare sound good.
 >  > The Times cites the Commonwealth Fund report (7/17) and its overall ranking 
 >  > of 11 wealthy nations. In the report Canada ranks ninth, â??only a little 
 >  > better,â?? the Times notes, than the US, which ranks last.
 >  > The report gives specific rankings on five subsections: care process, 
 >  > administrative efficiency, access, equity and outcomes.  The US ranks dead 
 >  > last in three of these outcomes, and second to last in another. Only in one 
 >  > of these rankings does the US rank higher than Canada (care process, where 
 >  > US ranks 5th, Canada 6th).  The Times does not mention these details.
 >  > They do, however, make a point to find ranking on a subsection of â??accessâ?
 >  > ? (again, where US ranks last) for timeliness (where the US ranks ninth, two 
 >  > spots ahead of Canada). In short, the paper takes a report that concludes 
 >  > the US has the worst healthcare system, ranking below Canada is almost every 
 >  > metric, and spins it to portray Canadaâ??s system as negatively as possible 
 >  > in comparison to the US.
 >  > This is an absurdly selective reading of a report whose damning conclusion 
 >  > was also not mentioned in the Times article:
 >  > Among the 11 countries we studied, the US was ranked last in overall health 
 >  > system performance, while spending the most per capita on healthcare. The 
 >  > insurance, payment and delivery system of the ACA have improved some aspects 
 >  > of healthcare system performance, but the US still greatly lags countries 
 >  > with universal health insurance coverage.
 >  > Vox (10/31/17)
 >  > The New York Times has been reliably anti-single-payer for decades (FAIR.org,
 >  >  7/1/93; Extra!, 4/1/10). Vox is a newer project, led by Ezra Klein and 
 >  > staffed mostly by moderate/liberal wonks. But it has largely advanced a 
 >  > similar neoliberal narrative as the dominant media, if more firmly rooted in 
 >  > Democratic Party establishment politics (Jacobin, 1/25/16). It has already 
 >  > gone to unique lengths to dismiss single-payer (e.g., 1/17/16, 1/20/16; 
 >  > 9/8/17).  As Glen Frieden recently noted (FAIR.org, 9/18/17), it even 
 >  > modifies its headline style to distance itself from the idea.
 >  > Voxâ??s major investor is Comcast (Wall Street Journal, 8/10/15), a massive 
 >  > conglomerate that owns numerous media outlets, including NBC and MSNBC, and 
 >  > has deep ties to the healthcare industry (FAIR.org, 1/30/16). When Sanders 
 >  > introduced a healthcare plan in the 2016 presidential election, Klein was 
 >  > quick to disparage it as â??puppies and rainbows,â?? saying it didnâ??t 
 >  > qualify as a plan at all. (No wonder the Clinton campaign team was so eager 
 >  > to coordinate with Klein during the campaign, as the leaked Podesta emails 
 >  > show.)
 >  > Voxâ??s coverage of Sandersâ?? trip to Canada, written by Sarah Kliff (
 >  > 10/31/17), was of a piece.  Her angle was that the trip only illustrated 
 >  > the difficulty of bringing single-payer to Americaâ??because Canadians view 
 >  > healthcare as a  human right, and â??that belief doesnâ??t seem to exist in 
 >  > the United States right now.â?? Canadaâ??s emphasis on equity and 
 >  > universality is not shared by enough Americans, only a small majority, as 
 >  > she notes.
 >  > She then mentions a number of anecdotal examples of Americans who dislike 
 >  > public healthcare, some of them from a New Yorker article (10/2/17). â??But 
 >  > I know so many folks on Medicaid that just don&#8217;t work. They&#8217;re 
 >  > lazy,â?? said one rust-belt librarian. Another man named Joe says:
 >  > I see people on the same road I live on who have never worked a lick in 
 >  > their life. They&#8217;re living on disability incomes, and they&#8217;re 
 >  > healthier than I am.
 >  > Vox couldâ??ve just as easily found two citizens in the same region who are 
 >  > strongly supportive of single-payer. (After all, as she concedes, a majority 
 >  > of Americans believe the government should provide healthcare to all.) So 
 >  > these anecdotes donâ??t demonstrate anything beyond the fact that  some 
 >  > opponents of healthcare as a right exist. This is true in Canada, too, as it 
 >  > is everywhere.
 >  > Kliff argues that the modest majority of Americans who support Medicare for 
 >  > All (she cites a Pew poll showing 60 percent support), isnâ??t enough 
 >  > consensus to have a single-payer system. In contrast, a poll from the 
 >  > Canadian Health Commission (8/26/14) shows â??85 percent of Canadians 
 >  > support (79.6) or somewhat support (5.6)â?? government-solutions to 
 >  > healthcare.
 >  > The problem with this is that Kliff is comparing US sentiment today to 
 >  > Canadian sentiment today. But Canadians have lived under single-payer for 
 >  > decades now and have seen outcomes improve. Would it not make more sense to 
 >  > compare Canadian sentiment back in the 1950s or 1960s, when the battle for 
 >  > Medicare for All was at a peak, with doctors striking in opposition?
 >  > In fact, the US in 2017 has a nearly identical proportion of citizens who 
 >  > support single-payer as Canada did at the infancy of its struggle. A 1960 
 >  > Gallup poll in Canada (Medical History, 4/11) showed 60 percent of the 
 >  > country approved of â??a state-led (single-payer) medical care insurance 
 >  > plan.â?? This number is identical to the US support shown for single-payer 
 >  > in an Economist/YouGov poll (4/2/17) from earlier this year, and similar to 
 >  > most US poll results.
 >  > Contrary to Kliffâ??s thesis, the US supports  a universal, public health 
 >  > system about as much as Canadians did when they were fighting for its 
 >  > implementation. This would seem to be a reason for optimism for single-payer,
 >  >  not the opposite, as Vox suggests.
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