The Association of Health Care Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists and 9 other scribbler groups have asked the Food and Drug Administration to lift its requirement that agency officials first get permission from the public relations office before speaking with reporters. The demand came in a letter sent to Principal Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, who is running the FDA's Transparency Task Force.
Good idea. In fact, it should be extended to every government agency.
Be careful what you wish for. That is the unexpected lesson of the past decade of biomedical research, which has been characterized by an overwhelming abundance of interesting things to study and powerful ways to study them. A pioneer of this era, MIT geneticist Eric Lander, speaks eloquently of the “global view of biology,” meaning that scientists now have extraordinary tools to study not only individual genes, but also multiple genes at the same time. Rather than immediately investing all their resources in a few favorite genes (the traditional approach), modern researchers first can survey thousands of initial candidates, then identify and ultimately direct their attention to the most important players and pivotal networks.But we are increasingly discovering that this global perspective comes at an unexpectedly steep price: We’re making a lot more mistakes. Or, at least, we seem to be having a lot of trouble picking out the rare, meaningful signal from the deafening noise in the background.
By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON
“We are now contemplating, Heaven save the mark, a bill that would tax the well for the benefit of the ill.”
No, that’s not Senate Minority Leader John Boehner, Rush Limbaugh or any of the other usual suspects complaining about the cost of health care reform. Rather, it’s the beginning of an editorial in the Aug. 15, 1949 issue of The New York State Journal of Medicine denouncing attempts to provide every American with health insurance. Sure, 90 percent were uninsured then, versus around 15 percent, today. But what’s amazing is the way the overheated arguments by conservatives have changed hardly at all in six decades, as evidenced by an op-ed in the July 15, 2009 Wall Street Journal entitled “Universal Health Care Isn’t Worth Our Freedom.”
Here’s the August, 1949 New York State Journal:
Any experienced general practitioner will agree that what keeps the great majority of people well is the fact that they can’t afford to be ill. That is a harsh, stern dictum and we readily admit that under it a certain number of cases of early tuberculosis and cancer, for example, may go undetected. Is it not better that a few such should perish rather than that the majority of the population should be encouraged on every occasion to run sniveling to the doctor? That in order to get their money’s worth they should be sick at every available opportunity? They will find out in time that the services they think they get for nothing – but which the whole people of the United States would pay for – are also worth nothing.
And here’s Dr. Thomas Szasz from the July 15, 2009 Wall Street Journal:
The idea that every life is infinitely precious and therefore everyone deserves the same kind of optimal medical care is a fine religious sentiment and moral ideal. As political and economic policy, it is vainglorious delusion. Rich and educated people not only receive better goods and services in all areas of life than do poor and uneducated people, they also tend to take better care of themselves and their possessions, which in turn leads to better health….We must stop talking about “health care” as if it were some kind of collective public service, like fire protection, provided equally to everyone who needs it….If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price. We will become the voluntary slaves of a “compassionate” government that will provide the same low quality health care to everyone.
Of course, there’s been some progress. Six decades ago, the kind of views expressed by Szasz and the New York Journal represented the medical mainstream. Today, even the most troglodyte are not suggesting the repeal of Medicare and Medicaid.
On the other hand, in those “pre-spin” days so long ago the health-insurance-for-all opponents of the past were forthright about the consequences of their principles for others. Today’s conservative fulminators prefer to forego mentioning the 20,000 preventable deaths each year – about 55 people each and every day – among those without insurance coverage.
The other great difference sixty years has made is the racial and ethnic composition of the uninsured. The uninsured today are disproportionately minority. Nearly one in four (36 percent) are Hispanic, 22 percent are black, 17 percent Asian/Pacific Islanders and just 13 percent white. The impact of those figures is clear. While nearly one third of Texans have no health insurance, the Republicans who dominate its Congressional delegation have shown no particular urgency to address a problem primarily affecting low-income Hispanics. (Fifty-eight 58 percent of the uninsured in the state are Hispanic, according to Kaiser Family Foundation figures.)
It’s important to remember that none of the Republican presidential candidates in either the primary or general election presented a serious plan to cover all the uninsured, nor have any of the Congressional GOP critics of Obama’s plan done so. In other words, the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans on universal access to health care, then, is not a difference on government should help accomplish this goal but whether the goal itself is worth pursuing.
Put differently, for those Americans who can’t afford medical care (or are afraid that they won’t be able to in the future), the GOP has a clear reply: drop dead.
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As a former citizen of the Washington Post newsroom, the recent disaster about the newspaper’s “salon” project is heartbreaking and embarrassing.
I won’t belabor the issues many others have so thoroughly covered, including today’s “apology” by publisher Katharine Weymouth, which feels a bit short of fulsome.
Instead I want to point out something that’s gotten lost in the media frenzy: That
the topic of the first “salon” [sorry, I find I have to use quotes when
referring to that] was to have been health care reform.
As an independent journalist [among other things] and participant in
the “health 2.0″ movement, I find this particularly distressing.
The fact that Weymouth and her team identified health care reform as
the first ripe target for a scheme to bring together “the powerful
few”: CEOs/lobbyists, “Congressional and Administration officials” and
Washington Post health care reporting and editorial staff” demonstrates
the peril faced by the group with the biggest stake in health care
reform.
I refer, of course, to patients.
Emory University psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen in the weekend Washington Post offers a troubling view of the public’s role in health care reform. While reform’s reality involves complicated technical issues like insurance exchanges, public plan governance, physician and hospital payments and who will pay higher taxes, the public’s understanding of these issues is virtually non-existent, Westen assumes.
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