CNN’s senior medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen, said in her report last week for the cable news network, a report that’s been running in a seemingly endless loop: “Fifteen years ago you sometimes heard—actually you heard quite a bit—people saying: ‘Let’s have a single-payer system like in Canada. The government is going to be the health insurer for everybody.’ You don’t hear that as much as you used to. So more people are on the same page more than they once were.”
Only one small problem. Cohen is flat wrong.
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) points out that it reported on 8 July 1993 that “New York Times polling since 1990 had consistently found majorities—ranging from 54 percent to 66 percent—in favor of tax-financed national health insurance.” FAIR goes on to point out that a New York Times/CBS poll this week (scroll down) found that roughly the same number of US citizens—59 percent—favor government-provided national health insurance.
It isn’t the people who have killed the demand for single-payer healthcare, it’s the corporate media, as the FAIR report in 1993 as well as a newer study released 6 March 2009 clearly show.
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