In her column on CJRorg, AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman writes that this week’s elections showed just how thoroughly the media missed the mark on health care reform coverage.
After the economy (62 percent), health care (19 percent) was the second most important issue to voters. And while the media (and the administration) trumpeted the benefits of Health Policy and “glossed over” the drawbacks, public opinion soured. The biggest oversight, Lieberman writes, was the national insurance mandate, a policy that was more Republican than Democrat.
Lieberman says it best:
If the media failed to discuss in detail the law’s less attractive points, it also missed one of the campaign’s biggest ironies. Republicans, with their repeal and replace slogans, stirred up discontent about a law that was basically built with Republican and conservative ideas. That irony escaped the media.
She doesn’t explicitly frame it as such, but Lieberman’s column leaves me with the distinct impression that with the health care debate reignited by a Republican landslide, journalists are being given a second chance to provide the public with a clear understanding of what’s going on in Washington, an impression that’s cemented with her final sentence:
Whatever happens, the U.S. health system is still its dysfunctional, fragmented, costly self, in need of repair or wholesale reform. Going forward, this is the story the media need to tell.
