Health Care BS

Have you ever known someone who steered every conversation, no matter what the subject, back to some favorite hobby horse? Imagine Uncle George at the Thanksgiving table commandeering a conversation about education so that he can treat everyone to his ten-thousandth rant about property taxes.

Increasingly, that’s how the “news” media behave about health care. No matter what the story is, they find some way to bring it back to the fabled uninsured or the high cost of health care, or whatever.  A case in point is this CNN piece about Friday’s hostage situation at Hillary’s Rochester campaign headquarters:

Eisenberg said he was a mental health patient who had been trying to get help.  He’d been unsuccessful, he said, because he didn’t have the “thousands of dollars” he was told he’d need.

And just to make sure no one misses the point or writes this guy off as a garden variety wackjob, the folks at CNN helpfully add the following:

Eisenberg was well-spoken, articulate and impassioned about his cause … “Something’s got to change. Ordinary people need help” with their insurance.

Notice that the last three words of the above passage are not in quotes. That means Eisenberg didn’t mention “insurance.” But the people at CNN wanted so badly to make this story about “universal coverage” that they augmented his actual words with their own tendentious verbiage.

CNN wasn’t terribly interested in the newsworthy aspects of the story, that some nutburger took a bunch of political volunteers hostage because he actually believed one of Hillary’s TV ads.  Like Uncle George, they saw it only as an opportunity exercise a favorite hobby horse.