By Michael Getler
PBS, April 23, 2010
PBS’s venerable public affairs and investigative series Frontline is, I confess, a favorite of mine, and has been for as long as I can remember watching public television. …
That doesn’t mean that at times it doesn’t stumble, or produce something that draws questioning and substantive criticism from viewers. Indeed, Frontline has been the subject of several ombudsman columns over the years. Yet one of the distinguishing things about Frontline from where I sit is that many of those who write at times to express disagreement frequently do so by also saying, first, how much they respect the program. In other words, even when it is bad, in their view, it’s still good.
At least some of that ambivalence was in evidence this week when our office was deluged with almost a thousand critical e-mails from people who said they were upset and angry that an hour-long look back at how the White House ultimately hammered out a historic agreement on health care, aptly titled “Obama’s Deal,” failed to deal with the single-payer system advocated by many of those who were not part of the deal.
Many of these e-mails appeared to have been generated in response to a handful of websites that criticized the program for what they saw as failures to deal fairly or adequately with this single-payer option and with one of its major proponents, Dr. Margaret Flowers. She is an activist member of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), who also appeared in the film, and was interviewed briefly on camera.
The PNHP is a non-profit organization that claims 17,000 members — doctors, medical students and health-care workers — and is dedicated exclusively to a single-payer system of national health insurance, with the government as the single payer in what they say would be an expanded and improved version of the existing Medicare program that would cover all Americans.
Dr. Flowers’ letter to me is posted below …
But first, some things that struck me as I watched the program, and some later thoughts about the single-payer criticism from Flowers and others. …
Not on, or Off, the Bandwagon
The specific absence of the single-payer theme, or even mention of it, did not strike me as I watched the film. I was aware of that approach to reform and the degree to which it had a large following. But it never really was on the table as something the administration wanted as its main health-care reform proposal and, as a viewer, I saw “Obama’s Deal” as what journalists would call a tick-tock, an attempt to reconstruct how something important, for better or worse, actually happened.
Yet I believe the critics make a couple of important points that I agree with, and that I, too, find puzzling about Frontline’s approach to this issue. The single-payer plan, as Producer Michael Kirk points out in his response printed below, was never considered by the White House or congressional leaders as a viable political option and therefore did not play a significant role in last year’s political debate and deal making.
On the other hand, this is not a typical throw-away or easily cast aside idea. A public opinion poll by CBS News and the New York Times in February 2009 reported 59 percent of respondents said the government should provide health insurance, and a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded that the same percentage of doctors “supported legislation to establish national health insurance.” A bill introduced years earlier in a House committee by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) supporting the single-payer plan through an expansion of Medicare had 87 co-sponsors as of February 2010 (more than any other universal health-care bill) and lots of labor union support.
So, while the hard-nosed journalistic decision may be to focus on the real options and debate, it seems to me that to ignore something that was out there and popular with millions of people and thousands of health-care professionals but not really on the table, was a mistake. Although obviously tight on time, the producers should have found 30 seconds to take this into account because many Americans support it yet the deal makers never mention it nor is the politics of discarding it addressed.
What is also puzzling to me is that this is the second time that producers of major Frontline programs on health care have decided not even to mention the single-payer system with respect to would-be reform. The other program was a March 31, 2009, broadcast of “Sick Around America” which provoked a substantial amount of controversy and that I also wrote about at the time. …
PNHP note: The full text of Mr. Getler’s commentary, including Dr. Flowers’ letter and the replies to her from Frontline series editor Ken Dornstein and the program’s producer Michael Kirk, can be found here:
http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/