Facts About Healthcare

Writing about David Sirota's comment on the trigger option made me thing about something. I didn't know that a trigger is a method of killing a bill. This is well known inside the Washington elite, but probably poorly understood in the country as a whole. This got me to thinking, how many other things about this issue have I been poorly informed about? I pay a lot of attention, but I'm not willing to read the 1000-page House bill. Even if I did, I'm not a medical or legal expert and there are likely things that I might have a tough time coming up with the correct interpretation.

The media coverage on the health care has focused on mainly superficialities: who's winning, who's losing, who's screaming loudest. Where are the in-depth newspaper and magazine articles that concisely and accurately explain what the various proposals are actually going to mean to a person like me? What are the important figures that are being debated? What's the size of the proposed hardship exemption?

Why can't newspapers and TV stations hire teams of doctors and lawyers without partisan bias (or as a balanced team) to read the bills and tell the reporters what I need to know about the proposals? It's easy to point a camera at people shouting at town halls, harder to read a 1000-page bill and lift the essentials out of it for your readers. But just because it's hard doesn't make it an excuse for shoddy journalism.

I understand that print journalism has taken quite a few hits recently, which unfortunately leaves TV to dominate the coverage. Olbermann and Maddow do their best, but their format doesn't lend itself to the type of in-depth coverage I'm looking for. They can interview experts and give them five or ten minutes to make a case, but I'm more interested in getting the numbers, in black and white, impartially.