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.
I do not think you are alone in being confused about the ACA. After all, Nancy Pelosi said "we have to pass it to see what is in it." This seems crazy to me that we have to pass a bill before we see what's in it. Yes, let's spend billions of dollars in taxpayers money to find out what is in a bill. It should come as no surprise that we are finding out that millions of people will lose their health insurance plans, because after all, even though we passed the ACA, we still do not know everything that is in it. The first article definitely bashed Obama a lot more, but that is what journalism is about: holding politicians accountable. Obama repeatedly said that if you wanted to keep your current healthcare plan, then you could do so. Of course, this was a lie since millions cannot keep their healthcare plans. So all this article is doing is calling the President out for going back on his promise.
ReplyDeleteEven though the NBC article hit hard on Obama and the Affordable Care act still, in my opinion, is not hitting hard enough. Why weren't the media holding our politicians accountable when this whole thing was up for debate in the congress? The news coverage during this time period only showered the President and the Democrats with glowing reviews of the ACA. I even remember President Obama giving a speech about healthcare at the White House to a group of Doctors, who the White House handed out white coats too so that during the speech it would be clear in photographs that he was talking to doctors and that they approved of the bill. It was a dog and pony show and now the dog and pony are on life support. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
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