Health Care

Friday's Morning Edition on NPR did its best to try to promote the liberal cause of expanding Medicaid in Texas. Wade Goodwyn lined up six soundbites from pro-expansion talking heads, versus only two from former Texas Governor Rick Perry, an opponent. Goodwyn played up that "in hating the Affordable Care Act, the state is leaving on the table as much as a hundred billion dollars of federal money…

Tuesday’s New York Times piece on how the problematic phrase “established by the state” got into and stayed in the Affordable Care Act provoked a great many blasts from lefty bloggers at the plaintiffs’ case in King v. Burwell. Two especially heated posts came from MSNBC’s Steve Benen and Esquire’s Charles Pierce. Benen, a producer for The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the show’s…

In an effort to preemptively denounce a Supreme Court ruling against ObamaCare, on Monday, the Associated Press warned of “ugly potential fallout” if health insurance subsidies in the law were struck down. The article began by fretting: “A Supreme Court ruling due in a few weeks could wipe out health insurance for millions of people covered by President Barack Obama's health care law.”

In the early 1990s, politicians floated the term “peace dividend” regarding a hoped-for post-Cold War reduction in the U.S. defense budget, and Pentagon spending indeed fell somewhat in the mid- and late ‘90s. Sean McElwee, a research associate at the lefty think tank Demos, argues that America now needs a post-9/11, post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq peace dividend which would allow greatly increased…

“The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.” That proverb sums up Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein’s Friday analysis of the policy and politics of Obamacare. In this metaphor, the dogs are ideologues on both sides who, heedless of evidence, have been barking (and snarling and growling) at each other about the Affordable Care Act. As Klein noted, “Social scientists have [determined that] the more…

Appearing on Friday's NBC Today to discuss the particularly bad spring allergy season, medical contributor Dr. Natalie Azar managed to work a top liberal agenda item into her analysis of the health issue: "It's a terrible allergy season. A couple reasons. One is that we had a really late winter....Another reason is climate change raises carbon dioxide levels, really contributes to the pollen."

It wasn’t just children who were running fevers after the recent measles outbreak at Disneyland. California parents' and lawmakers’ temperatures were also rising over the subject of vaccination legislation. On April 16, CBS This Morning reported that vaccination opponents lashed out at California State Senator Richard Pan, a Democrat, for sponsoring SB–277; a bill which would eliminate…

It was the best of coverage - it was the worst of coverage.

Journalists' and leftists' (but I repeat myself) misguided love for Cuba goes back decades. Y'know, free healthcare (cough), yada-yada. Now that President Obama is unilaterally changing the relationship between the two nations, and as usual getting nothing in return, you'd think that they'd be happy. Heck no. It started several months ago when Fox News's Shepard Smith fretted about how a thaw in…

Wednesday’s edition of the CBS Evening News chose to re-air portions of chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook’s interview with President Obama on climate change supposedly threatening public health and included LaPook fretting at the end to anchor Scott Pelley that “climate change legislation has stalled in Congress.” The network’s cheerleading of Obama’s newest environmental initiative…

Many people fantasize about what they’d try to accomplish if they were president of the United States. Some even write it down, and a few publish their thoughts, as Moore did earlier this week in the 150th-anniversary issue of The Nation. A few of the ítems on Moore’s list of twenty seem to be meant humorously (e.g., “free HBO for everyone”) but he’s serious about the clear majority of them,…

The CBS Evening News enthusiastically took to promoting ObamaCare in the form of a brief on its Monday night broadcast, hailing the fifth anniversary of President Obama signing the massive legislation into law. Anchor Scott Pelley began by reminding viewers that “[i]t was five years ago today that President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act known as ObamaCare.” Pelley rattled off a few…

CBS Evening News was the sole Big Three evening newscast on Friday to cover President Obama's visit to the V.A. hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, where "some vets died before they got treatment, and hospital officials hid those long delays on secret wait lists," as Scott Pelley put it. The CBS program also touted a veteran who poured cold water on the Obama administration's claim that appointment…

NBC News chief medical editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman announced her abrupt departure from the network on Thursday afternoon, stating that her violation of Ebola protocol in October 2014 has “contributed to my decision that now is the time to return to academic medicine.” After “becoming part of the story upon my return to the U.S.” from covering the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, Snyderman revealed that…