The health of the health care system will affect you as professionals and as citizens for a long time to come. But if you’re not political activists on the left or the right, there’s a good chance that, like many busy people, you’ve grown pretty sick of the daily news on the topic. Why? Here’s an excerpt from an excellent post on what’s missing from the news and why this means that so-called up-to-the-minute news can hide the real story as often as it can reveal it:

At the scale of news, almost every story looks complicated. Health reform is an impossible-to-follow morass of Congressional committees, policy proposals, industry talking points, and think tank reports. Pull back the lens a bit, however, and you see a fairly straightforward story whose basic contours haven’t changed all that much since 1994. […]

Here’s an excerpt from a recent article on the single-payer option for health care reform that appeared in the Online Journal:

As a civilized nation, we would never tolerate a system where police or fire services were treated as optional for some residents. To understand how utterly absurd our private health care system is, imagine life in America if we treated police and fire services the way we now treat most health care services.

In fact, we posted back in May about nurses who got arrested protesting the tabling of the single-payer option by a Senate Finance Committee. But since then, the media has been largely silent on the single-payer option, despite the fact that some version of it serves as the foundation of the health care system in most other prosperous industrialized nations. These nations are neither socialist nor communist, but their citizens have higher average life expectancies than our own. In these places, health care is viewed as an essential service rather than something each and every person may or may not be able to afford at any given time—depending on such variables as work status, marital status, health status, income level, genetic makeup, luck, place of residence, and so on.

Does it really make sense that no one is even talking about this option? Compare this silence to the amount of coverage devoted to false claims about “death panels” in the media in recent weeks. Is this imbalance in coverage serving the interests of the […]