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Reporting on health care reform: first, doing harm

newspaperboxes.jpgThe real scandal in American health care reporting isn’t in sound-bites about “death panels” or town hall squabbles. It lurks in between the lines. The news coverage of a recent report illustrates the unsettling way in which stories on health care reform can be framed.

It begins last week, when the Association of American Medical Colleges* (AAMC) released a report predicting that the US would face a shortage of at least 39,600 doctors by 2015. This is because hospitals, already strained, will soon be receiving more patients since more people will be covered thanks to health insurance reform passed by Congress earlier this year.

“The United States already was struggling with a critical physician shortage and the problem will only be exacerbated as 32 million Americans acquire health care coverage,” the AAMC said in a statement. The organization is urging Congress to lift the cap on Medicare-supported residency positions.


The headline of the Wall Street Journal’s blog entry on the study reads: “Health-Care Overhaul To Accelerate Doctor Shortage”. And the article by Reuters takes an even more aggressive tone in the lede: “The US healthcare reform law will worsen a shortage of physicians as millions of newly insured patients seek care”. Again, healthcare reform is a negative actor in this framing of the story.

Compare this to how a policeman shortage in the US state of Maryland was reported in the press: “The Baltimore police commissioner warns the city has a critical shortage of officers, threatening crime-fighting efforts.” Here, crime-fighting efforts are taken for granted as a necessary thing. No journalist in America would write an article suggesting that politicians who want to get tough on crime are irresponsibly exacerbating a policeman-shortage problem.

When examined individually, these news stories may seem inconsequential. But journalism sets the tone for larger narratives. George Orwell once wrote that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.” Stories on health care reform can take any number of angles, but the easiest one is cause-and-effect. Many news articles unfortunately use language to hint that health care reform is creating problems, rather than exposing the deeply flawed system the US has been coping with.

A blogger at the right-wing site Hot Air, citing the Reuters article, writes: “although we were aware that a doctor shortage was coming anyway, dumping 32 million people into Medicaid makes it worse, because of the increased demand”. It seems that the real problem in this writer’s mind isn’t the anticipated doctor shortage, or the fact that 32 million of his countrymen were previously receiving substandard care, but rather the inconvenience of those 32 million seeking treatment.

There’s probably some reasonable conservative objections lurking somewhere, but it’s hard to pick them out of the callousness that animates so much of the right-wing’s opposition to health care reform. Earlier this month, Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, said it was only logical that insurance should be denied to people with preexisting conditions, comparing them to “burnt-down houses”.

Image by Susan Lesch via Wikimedia Commons

*Correction (October 6, 2010): This post originally gave the name of the group as the American Association of Medical Colleges.

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