‘Mandating Everybody to Buy Insurance Was Not the Solution We Found’

Janine Jackson: It’s no surprise that healthcare continues to be front-page news. It is disheartening, though, how little the conversation has changed in terms of the limits of what’s considered possible. Corporate media have an outsized role in constraining that conversation. Producer and author T.R. Reid discovered just how resistant to expanding the conversation media can be. He told his story to CounterSpin in April of 2009.

But if you saw it, you didn’t see Reid, although he did reporting for the film. Why not? Reid says the final film just didn’t reflect the reporting that went into it or his earlier work. Frontline says Reid is too much of an advocate, while they wanted the film—which included no supporters of single payer—to be neutral.

Well, journalistic disputes are not uncommon, of course, but what does this one tell us about the state of media debate on healthcare in this country? Are certain political assumptions so ingrained that not even actual reporting can dislodge them? Joining us now by phone from Denver is T.R. Reid. Welcome to CounterSpin.

T.R. Reid: Hi, Janine. Delighted to be here.

JJ: Without asking you to relive the experience, what was the core difference between the healthcare reality you researched and reported, and the one that appeared in the final version of Sick Around America, such that you had to take your name off it?

TRR: I don’t think the problem is that I was biased. I mean, I’ve made two other healthcare films for Frontline, and they hired me for the third one, so I don’t think they would have considered me biased.

You know, people disagree on healthcare policy. It’s a topic that some people are ferociously excited about. We have the richest, most powerful country in the world, but we definitely don’t have the best healthcare system, and we should, with the money we spend, and the training we have for docs and nurses. So people are looking for ways to fix this, and, you know, it gets partisan, it gets controversial.

What happened on this film is after we finished the reporting, Frontline producers and bosses up in Boston put together, edited a film and wrote a script. I didn’t see any of this, and by the time I saw it, I thought it was wrong. And we talked about it; they listened to me. They didn’t want to make any changes, so I said, well, you can’t put me in the film, and they said fine.

JJ: Now, did you find factual inaccuracies, or was it a question of—

TRR: No, I didn’t find factual inaccuracies. In the part of the film that I was in, I don’t think there was anything factually inaccurate. It wasn’t that. They kind of steered the logic of their film in a certain way. They did a very good job of explaining problems with American healthcare. They said they didn’t want to mention any solutions. But then at the end of their film, they talk about the idea of mandating everybody to buy insurance from the private insurance industry, and the interesting thing is, they don’t see that as suggesting a solution. To me, that was suggesting a solution, and I don’t think it’s the solution that represents what we found when we went around the world. So that’s what I told them.

But I think one of the reasons that they don’t understand all the criticism of the film is because they genuinely think they were just reporting news and not proposing a solution. I noticed the FAIR write-up of the film criticized them for picking this one solution. But the people at Frontline would still say oh, no, no, we didn’t pick any solution.

JJ: Hmm. Well, yeah, FAIR did do an action alert on Sick Around America, because we found that they treated, in our view, mandatory for-profit insurance coverage as really the only alternative to the current US system. But also we noted that the film asserts really, at one point, that the way that other developed countries guarantee universal coverage is, as the narrator put it, “They make insurers cover everyone and they make all citizens buy insurance, and the poor are subsidized.” But is that really the lesson you took away from those countries that allow some private-sector role in health financing, that people are required to buy insurance from for-profit companies?

TRR: No, that’s a really good point. Many countries do provide healthcare for everybody with private doctors, private insurance and private hospitals. It’s not all socialized medicine. As you remember, that was the point of our first film. That’s the point of my forthcoming book. But none of those countries allow the insurance companies to make a profit on basic coverage. All those countries require that insurance companies pay every claim, they can’t deny claims like ours do.

And they all have controls on the administrative costs of the insurance companies. Most insurance companies around the world have administrative costs about one-fourth or one-fifth as high as the paperwork costs at American companies.

So that’s kind of what I felt, to suggest that…. No country would mandate anybody into an American health insurance company, because it’s just not the kind of insurance any other country has.

JJ: Well, Frontline’s comments, and we touched on it, they asserted:

The dispute centered on a conflict between Frontline’s journalistic commitment to fair and nuanced reporting and its aversion to policy advocacy, and Mr. Reid’s commitment to advocacy for specific healthcare policy reforms.

In other words, you have an agenda and they don’t. But setting aside healthcare per se, I wonder what your response to that is as a journalist, that you are too involved in the issue and that you’re wedded to particular solutions, and therefore you can’t report it.

TRR: Yeah, it’s really an interesting question. In the first place, I’m not wedded to particular solutions. If you look at the last chapter of my forthcoming book, I argue that we can borrow ideas from lots of different countries, there’s no particular plan or approach that has to work, that we have to adopt. I don’t think I’m wedded to a particular solution.

I am wedded to the notion that everybody in America should have access to the doctor when they need it, and that this should be done fairly and under reasonable cost. And is that biased? You know, some people would criticize that and say no, no, healthcare is a commodity and if you can afford it, you can get it. I don’t agree with that view, so does that make me biased?

I’ll tell you, Janine, I’ve covered a lot of presidential campaigns for the Washington Post, and, you know, you get on the airplane with the candidate and you travel around the country with her for weeks or months. And it’s pretty hard not to decide, yourself, either this person would be a great president, or this person would be a total baboon in the White House. You know what I mean?

So of course reporters develop preferences or ideas or partisan feelings. That happens. I think the craft is to get around them. The craft, at least in American journalism, is to try to present the issue fairly and let the reader decide.

Janine Jackson: That was T.R. Reid talking with CounterSpin in April 2009. Evidence that while the headlines may change, the need to look behind them does not.

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