Where is the Single Payer Debate?

With all of the attention on the pending health care overhaul focusing primarily on scare tactics, misinformation, and rowdy town hall meetings, one option has flown conspicuously under the radar: a national single-payer system, or more easily understood as Medicare-for-all. The benefits of such a system, which President Obama supported as a Senator, include:

• health care delivery would remain private, i.e. private doctors, private hospitals, etc
• the government would act as the sole provider of health insurance which would drastically reduce paperwork and administrative costs (medicare operates at a 3-4% overhead as compared to 30-40% for the average for-profit insurance company)
• no more insurance executives making hundreds of millions or, in the case of GroupHealth executive Bill McGwire, billions of dollars off of the sick and dying
  
• by creating the largest pool of insureds possible, it would maximize the spreading of risk and provide the cheapest possible form of insurance

So why hasn't this potential solution been a part of the debate even though recent polls suggest that it is the option most Americans would support, while they may not even know they are supporting it?

According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, FAIR, the answer simple: interlocking boards of directors among the media, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries. Their investigative reporting found that:

"nine major media corporations and their major outlets, Disney (ABC), General Electric (NBC), CBS, Time Warner (CNN, Time), News Corporation (Fox), New York Times Co., Washington Post Co. (Newsweek), Tribune Co. (Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times) and Gannett (USA Today) found connections to six different insurance companies. Five out of the nine media corporations studied shared a director with an insurance company; two insurance companies—Chubb and Berkshire Hathaway—were represented by more than one media corporation director.

"The study also found crossover between these media corporations and several large pharmaceutical companies, such as Eli Lilly, Merck and Novartis, whose profits would also likely be negatively impacted by a single-payer system. Out of the nine media corporations studied, six had directors who also represented the interests of at least one pharmaceutical company. In fact, save for CBS, every media corporation had board connections to either an insurance or pharmaceutical company."

This overlapping wouldn't be cause for concern had FAIR not discovered the following trend:

"single-payer was mentioned in only 164 articles or news segments from January 1 through June 30, 2009; over 70% of these mentions did not include the voice of a single-payer advocate. Over 45% of the pieces that did include a single-payer advocate were episodes of the Ed Show, an MSNBC program whose host, Ed Shultz, frequently advocates for single-payer healthcare. Without the Ed Show, just 19% of articles or news segments that mentioned single-payer would have included an actual advocate of the plan."

So the next time you hear a negative portrayal of a national single-payer system, such as Canada's, ask yourself if the media corporation telling you that has a conflict of interest in doing so...