Health Care and the Medias' Focus

Health care outrage goes uncovered is a very interesting and eye opening article written by Paul Begala, a CNN contributor, on June 19th, 2009. The article begins by discussing horrific stories of Americans who lost their health coverage after being diagnosed with serious, life threatening, and expensive diseases through what seems to be loopholes in the system. Mr. Begala then continues to discuss what U.S. Senators are doing to fight the injustices and how amazingly the media is not covering these outrageous stories and instead "found space on the front page the morning after the hearing for a story on the cancellation of Fourth of July fireworks in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania".

This article is well written and very informative. The author provides numerous examples of people who paid their premiums on time and were dropped by the insurance companies. He provides in detail the circumstances by which the insurance companies decided to drop the insured. He lists the senators involved in the defense of the victims and details of the conversations held with the insurance companies. I feel the key to this article was that he pointed out exactly what the different major news organizations in America were reporting the day after the hearing even calling out his own organization for not giving it enough attention; "Yet it got no airtime on the networks, nor, as far as I can tell, on cable news, although CNN.com did run a story."

I did find some downsides to this article. I felt the section where Begala discusses his past with the Clinton Administration, and things he learned along the way were irrelevant to the story at hand. I realize he was trying to explain his point of how or why the media is not focused on this story through the use of comparison however I found it boring and unnecessary to make his point. Towards the end of the article he states, "I understand that Obama's White House team has to juggle a lot of issues; I've been there. And I'm sure the Obama financial reforms have merit. But if the president wants to pass his ambitious health care reform, he's going to have to put other, worthy, ideas on the back burner and shine the media spotlight on the plight of people like Robin Beaton." this I also found unnecessary, it seemed as though he was trying to compare the Clinton Administration to the Obama Administration, and although the Clinton Administration may have had its positives it was not able to accomplish true Health Care Reform or we would not be discussing this today. Furthermore, the Obama Administration has only been in office for 9 months, I think it is unfair to judge the administration's efforts at such an early stage.

Overall it is a great, eye opening article. It is sad to see that the media is more interested in the death of Michael Jackson than the injustices of the insurance companies we rely on to take care of us in a time of need. I would recommend reading the article and to keep yourself informed of these types of situations. Thanks to this article, I will be more careful of what I tell doctors and make sure I know what is being written in my charts.