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Health care overhaul leads to ad war
A health care ad from the group Conservatives for Patients' Rights.
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TEXT OF STORY
President Obama is spending his 48th birthday today meeting with Democratic senators who leave for their August recess this week. The House has already gone on vacation, which means any health care overhaul
is going to have to wait until the fall. Marketplace's Steve Henn says that delay opens the way for a health care advertising war, and not everyone is playing fair.
STEVE HENN: Evan Tracy tracks political advertising for the Campaign Media Analysis Group. He says the health care debate is quickly becoming an advertising free for all.
EVAN TRACY: We are at fifty million-plus being spent on television ads so far. We've got dozens of different players.
Their messages are all over the map. Tracy says this cacophony favors the bill's opponents.
TRACY: Because it lends itself to a much more emotional demagoguing message.
Targeted ads on hot-button issues like this...
AD: They won't pay for my surgery but we're forced to pay for abortions.
Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org calls that ad misleading. He says several others attacking the overhaul are simply false.
BROOKS JACKSON: We are now seeing opponents twist and distort things that are not in any legislation.
But with the details of the health care overhaul still being hammered out, Tracy says the public's confusion about the plan makes it easy to attack.
In Washington, I'm Steve Henn for Marketplace.
Remember when we used to have mostly non-profit Hospitals? Every time big money looks around and sees something that might make them more money, they buy it up or change the earnings picture. As all the smart college grads started going into to finance for more money than manufacturing
we lost our place in the world market. and insorance is on lomger the same business that it used to be.
Nearly everyone agrees that our current, inequitable and unsustainable health care system needs reform. Why are the reformers (politicians) designing our reform around, and seeking guidance from, the private, profit-motivated insurance industry? Unlike single-payer reimbursement (like Medicare), private insurance companies limit choice; you can not choose any physician or hospital that is not on your plan. An “improved†insurance company based system will not contain costs, as already demonstrated by the Congressional budget Office. Single-payer (Medicare-like) is the only form of coverage that would bring down the cost of care so much (through reduced administration costs, elimination of advertising and the costs of "weeding out high-cost subscribers", and through high-volume bargaining power with pharma) that the savings would be enough to cover every American without any additional cost to what we pay now. This, too, has already been demonstrated. So why are we not all asking Congress to make single-payer, universal health care (Medicare-for-all) a seriously part of the discussion on reform? Why are we not asking the Media for more information about this model of reform?
Health Care is too expensive. Health Insurance is unaffordable or unavailable. Between suppliers profit, pharmaceutical profit, hospital, clinic and drug store profit, doctor and provider's profit and Insurance companies profit, we've priced the service beyond practicality. The entire Heath Care System needs scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.
