ABQ Journal gives health care reform mostly sickly coverage

Let’s hear it for ABQ Journal Watch!

The new blog from former Albuquerque Journal reporters Tracy Dingmann and Denise Tessier is bound to serve the public interest. I hope, though, they haven’t underestimated the task.

For in highlighting Journal sins against journalism here, I have merely scratched the surface, pointing out a few obvious sins of commission.

It’s clear the Journal injects its editorial views into news columns by writing tendentious headlines and using untrustworthy “stories” from the Washington bureau of the Associated Press.

But I have never dealt with its sins of omission. Failing to offer context is one. Another is declining to cover basic stories, perhaps because they would contradict the newspaper’s partisan mission.

Both are at play in the Journal’s treatment of health care reform, a huge national and local story.

The Journal carried a wire report in June on the American Medical Association’s opposition to a government insurance option. The AMA is the nation’s largest physicians organization.
There was no mention, however, of its decline; the AMA represents only about one in five practicing physicians today. And nearly half its members may oppose AMA policies.

That last informed conjecture is from Dr. David Himmelstein, of Harvard Medical School and Physicians for a National Health Program, which favors a single-payer system.
The American College of Physicians, representing internists, also is open to single-payer and a public option.

But you read none of that in the Albuquerque Journal, which also neglected to cite the AMA’s long, inglorious record of opposing affordable health care, including its failed attempt to strangle Medicare in the womb.

But the Journal is local so let’s evaluate its local coverage. Ooops! There isn’t much, with the exception of business reporter Winthrop Quigley’s top-notch work.

Quigley’s useful front-page analysis on July 5 — “More Questions Than Answers”– pointed out that Washington was talking expanded coverage and its cost but not much about making people healthier.

Notably, he went beyond the usual suspects (New Mexico’s insurers and physicians) to solicit the views of community health activists, the nurses association and — mirabile dictu! — organized labor.
Quigley’s piece ended with a flourish when Ron Stern, CEO of Lovelace Health System, opined that Americans, as a society, should agree that health care is a priority. “Let’s pick a (spending) number,” Stern said, “then go out and tax accordingly.”

What straight-talk! Here’s an American business honcho unashamed to declare that we, the people, should tax ourselves to underwrite his profit-making corporation.
An excellent reminder that our system is “Socialism for sizeable corporations.”

Not incidentally, the Journal appended to Quigley’s essay a summary of issues (from AP’s Washington bureau) along with a graph under the rubric, “Big Government vs. Business.”
Not, mind you, “Big Government vs. Big Business.” And not, “Government vs. Big Business.”

But back to local stories the Journal isn’t tackling:

• The cost of not reforming health insurance.

• What New Mexico physicians think.

• How do our health insurers operate? How many applicants do they reject? Why?

• How often do New Mexicans protected by health insurance learn — after falling ill — that they forgot to read the small print?

• How is small business faring vis-à-vis our health insurers?

• Does patient care at Lovelace (for-profit)and Presbyterian (non-profit) differ? (I know from experience that it does.)

• How much are our health insurers spending to lobby against the public option?

These are basic stories. So how come the Journal hasn’t assigned them? Because the results would contradict the Journal’s partisan agenda, I surmise, but I could be wrong.
All the more reason to anticipate ABQ Journal Watch’s take on journalism at the state’s largest daily.