AHCJ president Trudy Lieberman recently appeared on Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, with Marcia Angell, M.D., a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard University Medical School, to discuss health care reform. [Transcript]
Lieberman, director of the Health and Medicine Reporting Program in the Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York, makes the point that Obama and his administration have been deliberately vague about the details. She says the American people do not know what’s in the bill: an individual mandate that will cost a lot of money for most people. “I think this is going to come up as a big surprise to people to realize they’re going to have to buy insurance from private insurance companies or face a tax penalty.”
Angell says that “Delivers to the private insurance industry a captive market.”
The plan, Lieberman says, will be a “bonanza” for the health insurance and industries, as well as for the doctors.
The guests also discuss the health care industry’s public stance (volunteering to cut costs) versus what it is doing behind the scenes (lobbying against the public plan and cuts in fees). Rationing comes up, with Lieberman saying that the current system rations treatment based on income.
Lieberman also expresses her frustration about trying to explain such vague proposals to the American people.
“And as a journalist, whose job it is to explain to the average person on the street what all of this means to them – that’s not happening. And as a journalist, that troubles me. The press has not dealt with the issue of how this is going to affect the auto mechanic on Main Street. Or the babysitter.”
