It looks like health insurance reform legislation is going to pass the House this weekend, and that the Senate will approve it.
Great news — for the 30 million Americans who will finally get insurance, for the 44,000 who have been dying each year from a lack of insurance, and for the rest of us who will no longer be screwed over in various nasty ways by profit-hungry private insurance companies.
But it won't be pleasant news for Fox News, which will be deeply embarrassed (or at least, should be) by how inaccurate its reporting and prognosticating on this issue has been.
Of course, "accuracy" isn't what comes to mind when I think "Fox News." Nonetheless, any organization with news in its name should be at least a little bit concerned when its viewers have been misled so badly.
I watch Fox News mostly when I use the step climbing machines at our athletic club, which face six televisions. If there's nothing more interesting on, I prefer to watch Fox News over Oprah, CNBC, or some other ghastly boring channel.
Since I put in 90 minutes of machine aerobics a week, I've watched quite a bit of Fox News coverage of health insurance reform over the past year.
What I was told, over and over and over and over, is "reform is dead," "reform is on its last legs," "reform never will pass," "reform is finished."
Today, the Intrade prediction market shows an 80% chance of the reform legislation passing. I'd give it an even higher percentage, but maybe that's my progressive optimism talking.
Regardless, this Intrade chart shows how health insurance reform has risen from a 20% chance of passing early this year to 80% today.
A reputable news organization would focus on reporting and analyzing what is actually happening. That used to be what "news" was all about: current events. But not anymore on cable news generally, and especially not on Fox News.
Since Fox News has a strong and obvious political agenda — progressives bad; conservatives good — it isn't capable of dispassionately telling its viewers what is actually happening, as contrasted to what it hopes will happen.
So rather than report "at the moment, the chance of health insurance reform passing is low," we were told "its dead!" Which, of course, was utterly wrong.
Hopefully this journalistic debacle will cause more than a few Fox News viewers to reconsider their loyalty. Reality is a great thing. When we don't live in it, preferring a fantasy, it's tough to prosper in a world that is so different from how we believe it is.
(Amazingly, just nine days ago Fox News was saying the reform legislation passed by the Senate was "dead on arrival" in the House. So much for "fair and balanced," along with accurate.)
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Doesn’t it bother you what the congress has done in order to insure passage of this bill? They have circumvented the democratic process. Doesn’t that raise a red flag to anyone? Wouldn’t it be better if we “all” came together to help people?
Nobody dies from a lack of health insurance. This lib talking point demonstrates their own hypocracy, though. If they believe that 44k die each year, they could have bought them all insurance coverage for around 300 million dollars. Think about the many pet projects that cost more than that. If these folks were really dying, and the libs really cared, they would have rerouted budget money long ago.
Butterfly, the democratic process hasn’t been subverted. Democrats have been using processes that are the same, or at least very similar, to what Republicans have done many times in the past. Plus, I’m a lot more bothered by the many problems of our health care system than I am about insider Washington politics.
kay, along that line, you are flat wrong about nobody dying from a lack of health insurance. The study I linked to in my post was published in the American Journal of Public Health and was conducted by Harvard researchers.
Read the study:
http://pnhp.org/excessdeaths/health-insurance-and-mortality-in-US-adults.pdf
It concluded “uninsurance is associated with mortality,” a conclusion found in other studies. So if you’re against extending health insurance to 30 million or more Americans, you’re anti-life and pro-death. It’s that simple. Me, I’m proudly pro-life.
I think a lot more people die from health care simply not being available than from not being able to pay for health care that IS available.
Ultimately, any health care reform measures will do nothing to ensure the availability of health care. Unless, of course, a geographic or demographic quota requirement is codified.
We humans are a Me-First species. As long as I have mine, I am in a position to assist others – if I happen to be so inclined. With billions of us on the planet and hundreds of millions of us in the USA, there is bound to be conflict.
We live in interesting times.
Thank you!!!! I could not agree more! I have so many conservative friends who follow FOX NEWs religiously. I myself watch several sources of news & never once has FOX proved to me to be anything but a GOP Public Relations network. I’ve tried many times to Blog on FOX to give them an opposing viewpoint only to have my opinion “omitted”. I get so tired of reading their 3rd Reich-like talking points played out as if the rest of the free world thinks like they do. What’s more upsetting is that whenever I do see an opposing view point published it usually makes the author appear as an ignorant foul mouth hick. I’m under the impression that FOX generates these fake comments as a way of punctuating their agenda points. PS: They picked the perfect name. FOX. As in “Sly as a Fox.”
The Republicans scream about deficits and taxes. Yet they were the cheerleaders behind the big give-away when Bush came into office in 2001 and emptied out a Trillion dollars in tax surpluses. (Huge sums of cash were given to the 1% mega-rich) Then after 9-11 instead of focusing on the Terrorist camps in Afghanistan the Republicans pushed for attacking Iraq costing billions of dollars & thousands of lives. It seems that the Republicans don’t have a problem spending money when it comes to killing the wrong enemy. But they scream & cry if we spend money to help our own people get healthy.
Contrary to Republican beliefs many of us non-republicans believe in Jesus too. And the phrase “What would Jesus do?” He’d heal the sick. We need to follow him by example. God Bless you President Obama. Those of us with Chronic illnesses salute you.