Single Payer Health Insurance / Still Ignored By Main Steam Press

Progressive Review reveals that over the past week, hundreds of stories in major newspapers and on NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and PBS's News Hour With Jim Lehrer mentioned healthcare reform, according to a search of the Nexis database. Yet all but 18 of these stories made no mention of single-payer (or synonyms commonly used by its proponents, such as "Medicare for all," or the proposed single-payer bill, H.R. 676), and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer--none of which appeared on television.

Of a total of 10 newspaper columns FAIR found that mentioned single-payer, Neo con hack Charles Krauthammer's syndicated column critical of the concept, published in the Washington Post and reprinted in four other daily newspapers, accounted for five instances. Only three columns in the study period advocated for a single- payer system.

The FAIR study turned up only three mentions of single-payer on the TV outlets surveyed, and two of those references were by TV guests who expressed strong disapproval of it.

Single-payer ~ a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada's very popular current system) ~ polls well with the public, who preferred it two-to-one over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09). http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3733

Health insurers and drug makers have been showering members of Congress with millions in campaign contributions over the last four years, with a special focus on leaders who will play major roles in shaping health-care legislation.

Obviously, the healthcare special interest lobby groups are exerting tremendous pressure on politicians as well as the media to stay on the Privatized bandwagon and ignore the people's wishes ~ but never underestimate an informed and angry public demanding change.

Here are the unanswered questions that the lobbyists can't answer and infuriates  most Americans.