PBS’s Frontline historically has produced some of the US’s most outstanding and compelling documentaries. But its March 31, 2009 presentation of Sick Around America was among the most biased pieces of corporate propaganda posing as reporting yet seen. The production considered mandatory, for-profit insurance coverage (aka the “Massachusetts model”) as the only viable alternative to the current US healthcare system.
Not one advocate of a single-payer, universal-coverage healthcare system in the US was interviewed for the documentary. Not one. Never mind that Representative John Conyers‘s (D-Michigan) H.R.676 proposed legislation to provide single-payer, universal-coverage healthcare system in the US has 74 cosponsors. Never mind that the majority of the US populace favors a single-payer, universal-coverage healthcare system. As do more than half of US doctors and two-thirds in Minnesota.
Never mind that Sick Around America was a sequel to Sick Around the World, which aired 15 April 2008. Sick Around the World examined several publicly-funded, single-payer healthcare systems, including Taiwan’s and the UK’s. Not one of the international healthcare systems investigated in the 2008 documentary is based on mandatory, for-profit insurance coverage. In fact, as the Canadian government reports, “the United States is the only OECD country that relies primarily on private insurance for healthcare financing.”
Frontline’s 2009 documentary on US healthcare actually contradicts Frontline’s 2008 documentary in almost every regard. And Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) notes that Frontline correspondent and former Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid explained in Sick Around the World that “when Taiwanese healthcare adopted single-payer it went from being ‘worse than America’s is today,’ with high rates of uninsured, to a system that guarantees coverage for all and ‘has the lowest administrative costs in the world, less than two percent.’”
FAIR reports that “Reid was supposed to be the correspondent for the new documentary, but he revealed in an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter (4/2/09) that he quit over concerns that the new documentary contradicted his earlier research:
“‘I said to them, mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world,’ Reid said. ‘I said, I’m not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn’t be. And we parted ways.’
“‘Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit,’ Reid said. ‘But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can’t allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance.’”
Update: Thursday, 9 April 2009 05:49PM CDT: Frontline has responded to FAIR’s action alert and critics of its documentary, Sick Around America, saying that the America’s Health Insurance Plans industry lobbyist “represents both for-profit and non-profit companies.”
With regard to the dispute with its former correspondent, T.R. Reid, Frontline states, it “believes 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, for positions he apparently advocates in his forthcoming book.”
As FAIR notes in its publication of Frontline’s response, “Misleading the public about global healthcare systems and failing to explore any of the publicly funded alternatives to America’s private insurance system, is a strange way indeed of demonstrating commitment to ‘fair and nuanced reporting.’”
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