News Media and 'Health Care Apartheid'

Sometimes, a couple of facts can leap out at us, jumping from the fusillade of inbound media and clarifying key realities in the midst of overload coverage.

It's easy to miss the forest of overall policy for the trees of scattered news. At the same time, a pivotal aspect of an issue can emerge in the form of concise information. That's true in recent media accounts of the struggle over health care proposals in Washington.

Buried in a July 18 chart headlined "How the Health Care Bills Compare," The New York Times provided some cogent yet cryptic information in the category of "Public Plan."

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions had just approved a bill that would "compete with private insurers," the Times chart explained. The public plan "would provide 'only the essential health benefits,' as defined by the bill, 'except in states that offer additional benefits.'"

Meanwhile, as the newspaper noted, "Democrats from three House committees are working on a single plan." Under that plan, "Different levels of coverage — 'basic, enhanced and premium' — can be offered through the public option."

In just a few grainy sentences (quickly swept beneath the waves from oceans of media), a disturbing aspect of "public plan" scenarios could be read. If the ostensible goal is health care for all, then some of the "all" would end up being much more equal than others.

The Republican attack on health care is coming from such a right-wing place that even the possibility of further government action to provide a modicum of health care across the economic board is antithetical to the ideological GOP.

In contrast, the broad outlines of a Democratic "public plan" at least embrace the precept that the not so tender mercies of the market are insufficient to provide for the population's medical needs.

But the "public plan" — generally touted by U.S. media as the pole of real options farthest from the Republican "free market" fixation — is inherently reconciled to major inequality in access to quality health care.

Even while straining to put forward a "public option" as some sort of stunning government intervention to level the health care playing field, media coverage rarely comes to terms with the situation that would actually remain under such a plan.

How does "health care apartheid" strike you?

We keep hearing that a "public option" would put the government in competition with private insurers. Some people think that's a bad thing, some people think it's a good thing. But news coverage and media punditry have given short shrift to how such an arrangement — even if enacted as the mainline Democratic proposals are indicating — would replicate and probably reinforce the aspects of U.S. health care industries that have created such an abysmal non-system for so many Americans.

For the government to offer the public a multi-tier set of options for health insurance — in the words of the chart in The New York Times, "different levels of coverage" such as "basic, enhanced and premium" — is to imitate the commodity approach of the corporate health care establishment.

And isn't it implicit that the government plan's "different levels of coverage," offered to the public, would be based on ability to pay?

Missing from the health care debate — not only along Pennsylvania Avenue but also along media row — is a principle that could be debated and should be debated.

In six words: Health care is a human right.

Ordinarily, we don't think of human rights as contingent on ability to pay. But if health care isn't a human right, then there's no problem with the main party plans in Washington — or, for that matter, with the status quo.

Norman Solomon is the author of the book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which has been made into a documentary film. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com.

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