What Frontline missed, and health care justice advocates should know

By Claudia Chaufan
Oh yeah! The progressive, single payer community did look forward to the screening of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Frontline production “Obama’s deal”, frustrated as we were by our voice having been buried in a misleading, media-backed “debate” that portrayed all opponents of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” as right-wing lunatics “against reform” – yes, the usual trick “you’re with us or with the terrorists”.
And to their credit, Frontline did a terrific job of documenting the countless back-room deals struck by the White House and Congress with Big Pharma and Big Insurance. As the production illustrated, these deals chipped away whatever progressive features the Act may have initially had, and turned it into a weapon of mass destruction of the pockets of ordinary folks who already barely make ends meet, and into an extraordinary sweet deal that will substantially increase the political and economic power of for-profit insurers for years to come. Unsurprisingly of course, given that the Act was almost literally dictated by WellPoint Inc., as the Frontline production pointed out.
Disappointingly, however, Frontline did not live up to its promise. While it did reveal some of the “realities of American politics, the power of special interest groups and the role of money in policy making”, it omitted showing viewers just what “Obama’s deal” had sacrificed, and what single payer advocates were being dragged to jail for, as they entered the meetings of the Senate Finance Committee chaired by health care czar Max Baucus. Rather, it merely portrayed them as yet another disaffected group within “President Obama’s liberal base”, which had to be appeased so that our president could move on with the serious stuff — “reforming” healthcare.
But it is precisely what the deal sacrificed that matters. Because single payer advocates, including many doctors such as Margaret Flowers, risked arrest, and were arrested, for standing up for a right to health care, through a publicly-financed and publicly delivered single payer system, that was being sacrificed at the altar of special interests, even as President Obama asserted, with a straight face, that “all options (for health care reform) are on the table”.
Now, could the reason for sacrificing a right to health care be that our charismatic president received at least ten times the money that his designated health care czar, Max Baucus, received from the very industries they were supposed to rein in? We don’t know, but the hypothesis is not implausible, and Frontline producers would have done their viewers a service had they explored this or any other plausible and alternative to the mainstream hypothesis further. In so doing they would have spoken truth to power, the least we can expect from progressive mass media.
Americans have by now gotten used to having the best Congress (and Presidency) “that money can buy”. Let us not be forced to put the progressive media into an equivalent category — “it’s the best media money can buy”.
Originally posted on Social Medicine Portal.