January 30, 2019
I was going to really tee off on this NYT article, calling Medicare for All an “ambitious and expensive left-wing” policy, but I think Paul Waldman did a nice job making the point in his Washington Post column.The basic point is that reporters should leave these sorts of adjectives out of their coverage of the debate over reforming the health care system.
Every other wealthy country has some sort of universal health care system, many with government-run insurance that look a lot like Medicare for All. This has not bankrupted any of them. So the idea that we should move to something like this sort of system in the United States should not be treated as an extreme left far out position.
On the other hand, there is an accurate adjective that could be applied to the assertion by billionaire Michael Bloomberg that a universal Medicare system “would bankrupt us for a very long time.” That adjective is “wrong.”
If the NYT is trying to better inform its readers about health care policy for the 2020 election, rather than telling them Medicare for All is an extreme position, it would point out when its critics make untrue assertions about the policy.
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