"Sick Around America" was enough to make you, well, sick!

As part of our last e-news and in one of the alerts on this blog we asked folks to hold screening house parties this week to watch Frontline's "Sick Around America." If you watched the show expecting to hear some personal stories of hellacious experiences within the for-profit health care system, you were probably not disappointed. If you expected to hear about our nation's options for solving this mess, or looked forward to the players having to answer to some hard questions, you probably sat on your sofa wondering why you had bothered to tune in.

Russell Mokhiber, writing at Counterpunch, points out probably the most gawdawful part of the piece:

"During that segment, about halfway through Sick Around America, the moderator introduces Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the lead health insurance lobby in the United States.

Moderator: Other developed countries guarantee coverage for everyone. We asked Karen Ignagni why it can't work here.

Karen Ignagni: Well, it would work if we did what other countries do, which is have a mandate that everybody participate. And if everybody is in, it's quite reasonable to ask our industry to do guarantee issue, to get everybody in. So, the answer to your question is we can, and the public here will have to agree to do what the public in other countries have done, which is a consensus that everybody should be in.

Moderator: That's what other developed countries do. They make insurers cover everyone, and they make all citizens buy insurance. And the poor are subsidized."

The problem, as Mokhiber points out, and as anyone who has been giving the health care debate more than a thimble's worth of attention over the last few years already knows, is that the moderator's gloss on what Ignagni said simply isn't true. Some countries have mandated private coverage, but the policies are held by non-profits, which are strictly regulated. Other countries simply treat health care like a right, funded by taxes, with everyone in regardless of income. Your "mandate" to participate is called "being born."

You can find out what TR Reid, correspondent (but not producer) for the piece has to say in Mokhiber's article. And if you saw "Sick Across America" and would like to say something to the producers, here's the email address: frontline@pbs.org. The PBS ombudsman is Michael Getler. His contact page is here.

For a really good look at health care in America, may we recommend "Health, Money and Fear", online at ourailinghealthcare.com, or available on dvd for houseparty screenings from the AfD office.

Update from an emailer: "Check out this webpage: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundamerica/talk/

"So many people wrote emails to Frontline admonishing them for not mentioning single-payer as a possible solution to our health care crisis that they printed a response trying to explain themselves. What I'd like to know is how Karen Ignagni, president and ceo of America's Health Insurance Plans, who is actively campaigning against the creation of a nationalized health care system in the U.S., got so much airtime, while single-payer advocates got no representation at all. The failures of our system, which were eloquently demonstrated in 'Sick Around America', are in large part a result of the greed of the profit-driven insurance industry and yet they got the pulpit in this piece."

Another update: The Columbia Journalism Review agrees--bad job!