Affordable Care Act isn't so...Affordable?

When the Affordable Care Act was passed all those years ago, I was still a young lad in high school. I was idealistic, optimistic, and I believed that as a country we were making a great step towards being a better country. Health care was something that even then I knew was a serious problem, and that the costs were (and still are) absolutely outrageous. I didn't really fully understand the bill then, and honestly I can't say I do now. It seems like it isn't something that really has made sense. I keep hearing conflicting statements about it in the news, and wrong information being spread by friends and family. It makes it hard to understand exactly what the bill is. Now though I'm starting to wonder if our government even knows what the bill is anymore. What I do know is that personal politics aside, I am tired of the government's consistent lying to the American people.  I like to try and use current news stories to talk about and this is very recent so I wanted to pull up two articles about it and compare them. Hopefully this blog post will be so good it'll make up for not doing one sooner.

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/29/21222195-obama-administration-knew-millions-could-not-keep-their-health-insurance?lite

Read that article from NBC. It is important for the rest of this blog post. Read it? Awesome, let us continue. I think it is safe to say that the article didn't pull a whole lot of punches as far as its tone and message. It wasn't written in a factual way to me (even if the facts are true), but if you disagree let me know. To me the tone of it really seemed intent on criticizing President Obama, the government, and the Affordable Care Act. The title of the article "Obama administration knew millions could lose their health insurance" is surely a title to gain attention and incite anger and outrage. The picture they chose under the headline seems pretty deliberate to make him seem shameful or guilty. The language of the article goes on the offensive as well. It uses statistics and comments from people about how badly this new healthcare hurts them. It shows how dishonest President Obama has been with the American people about keeping their coverage.

As a taxpaying American, this part for me showed the journalist did their job and evoked an emotional response of anger.

"Today, White House spokesman Jay Carney was asked about the president’s promise that consumers would be able to keep their health care. “What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide,” Carney said. “So it's true that there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that don't meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.”

This to me is a completely dishonest statement that any POLS student should be  able to see right through. Even as a dumb high school student I remember President Obama saying people could keep their current plan if they wanted to. I've heard that statement for years. The language in Jay Carney's statement to me was poorly written and can be seen through very easily. 

I know this is a long blog post, but stick with me here. Here is an article from Fox News. 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/29/pols-push-keep-your-health-plan-act-as-files-show-govt-knew-millions-could-lose/

Surprisingly this article doesn't go on the offensive as much as the other one did. This one seems to focus more on the Republicans' response to it. It wants the Republican Party to seem like the good guys, fighting for the American people (even though they staged a bad government shutdown that affected millions of Americans just last week). It is a much simpler article to pick through the the other one.

What do you guys think? I'm interested to read any responses.

Who Is To Blame?

I am sure that a lot of you have heard about the government shutdown causing issues with funerals for soldiers who have died in combat. I try not to bring my personal politics into these blogs too much but I feel that this is a really bad development. The fact that Congress is being paid while soldier's families are not being compensated for their death is absolutely a disgrace. I thought this would be a good topic to see how differently the story is being reported by Fox News and CNN.

Let us take a look at CNN's article on the matter. Here is the link http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/08/outrage-builds-over-lapse-in-funding-for-families-of-fallen-heroes/?hpt=po_c2. Read over that. Read it? Good. Now I have to say that I this article is fairly well written as far as objective journalism goes. I was waiting for a part of it to put the blame on the Republicans but honestly it seemed pretty fair.

Here it says:

"Republicans are drafting legislation that would restore death benefit payments, which the Pentagon says were frozen under the shutdown, to the survivors of service members killed in action, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers told CNN. Discord over the lapse in funding was seemingly bipartisan."

Now let us take a look over at the Fox News side of things. Here is the link. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/08/pentagon-freezes-death-benefits-for-fallen-soldiers-families/. I think you can see a few different things here.

"House lawmakers, though, are planning to vote Wednesday on a bill to restore funding for the payments. And Speaker John Boehner on Tuesday accused the Obama administration of needlessly withholding the money."

The CNN article didn't mention anyone blaming anyone. Yet in Fox News we have the champion of the people, John Boehner claiming that this is Obama's administration's fault. Now, I'm pretty sure as a student of Political Science that the fault lies with the government shutdown. The government shutdown is the fault of Congress. So I"m not sure where Obama's administration comes into that. We should also probably blame Obama for global warming and gay rights as well.

It wasn't really a very in depth look but I wanted to examine just how an every day news story might have some bias to it. This was also a story that I was interested in covering for this blog. If anything, the government shutdown is providing me with good material to write about and especially good bias.