The Affordable Health Care for America Act won’t kill the elderly, as some allege, but misrepresentations about the law and medicine in general absolutely do kill.
Recently a friend of my boss died from pneumonia. He was an uninsured alcoholic who had been sober for 15 years, ate well and spent time in the gym. He delayed going to his doctor until his temperature was rising quickly, then refused to go to the hospital. He apparently believed the antibiotics and his strong body were enough.
In the night his fever increased. His landlady saw him out in the snow, she thinks, trying to bring down his body temperature. She found him dead the following morning. As near as anyone knows, when he lay down he fell asleep and his lungs continued to fill until he couldn’t breathe.
The week before, the mother of a friend died from pneumonia in a nursing home after her father had refused treatment for her. It was bacterial in origin, possibly caused by a piece of food that had become stuck. The woman suffered from dementia and either didn’t notice the irritation or couldn’t explain it. She died less than a day after my friend heard she was sick.
Bacterial pneumonia is treatable with antibiotics. Patients with the viral form usually survive when they’re given intravenous fluids and monitored during the crisis.
As near as the daughter and my boss know, both people weren’t treated because men believed they couldn’t afford the treatment. The eighty-five-year-old woman was covered by Medicare. An emergency room would have had to treat the fifty-something man, regardless of his income or insurance status.
I don’t know if the man was uninsured because, as my boss believes, he was one of the many who have the money, but believe they’re too healthy to need insurance, or if he’d tried in the past and been refused. Perhaps being a recovering alcoholic, for Alcoholics Anonymous says you are never an ex-drinker, is itself a disqualifying pre-existing condition. The new law, with its demand for universal coverage, phases out such hurdles to medical treatment, though it can do nothing about the bitterness created by rejection.
False perceptions arise from the health care debate that emphasizes the high cost of treatment and the plight of the uninsured. We’re constantly told emergency rooms are overwhelmed as a result. The subtexts are that treatment might have become substandard and that people who use them are parasites. We certainly are told the costs are greater.
What people don’t hear is that there are new alternatives to emergency rooms, the urgent care centers. If the man had gone to one, instead of waiting to see his doctor, he would have been diagnosed faster and they probably would have begun treating him immediately because they had the necessary resources on site.
When people hear about the cost of treating the elderly who will never recover all their capacities, they don’t hear there’s a difference between treating a disease like cancer, which may kill anyway, and treating a temporary infection.
The ignorance about the dangers of out of control infections also comes from the same media sources, the ones who deny climate change and evolution. In making their arguments, they treat scientists and science with contempt. That attitude, in turn, reinforces people’s natural fear of disease and distrust of doctors who can’t treat the common cold. It makes some people less likely to listen to the medical programs that do appear on television that try to educate about diseases like pneumonia.
The media would deny its responsibility, in the same way it denied there was any relationship between its words and the actions of Jared Loughner who shot Gabrielle Gifford in Tucson on July 8. They would say they are not responsible for the individual actions of a one-time drunk or a man tired of a marriage. They would say individual actions are just that, individual, and not part of a social pattern.
They might also suggest the solution was eliminating malpractice laws. Regulations and contracts may have dictated what an institution or physician could have done in these situations.
However, I do wonder what ethics can condone a nursing home that doesn’t begin treating a treatable infection immediately or a doctor who doesn’t call the ambulance or send a nurse with a man obviously in need of treatment. I wonder what is their moral obligation to seriously inform people of their choices when they can see the people there are talking to are laboring under serious misunderstandings of medical situations.
Ideas, diffused through an atmosphere of misrepresentations and paranoia that feeds of people’s instinctive fears of the unknown or uncontrollable, indeed can kill as swiftly as the infections they abet.
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Cheap Media - A Screed
William Randolph Hearst knew it - control of cheap media gives you power. Why can’t the left remember this clear lesson?
When FM radio gave better music production in the 1960's, the young and hip changed their dials. AM remained, often relying on all-news and talk shows. When laws changed, and the ownership of AM radio stations consolidated, programs like those of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck expanded their audience. Those without the money to buy FM radios heard only one side.
When cable appeared, the young and hip changed their habits. Network TV remained for those who couldn’t afford the monthly fees. Fox defined itself as a network and was there.
Then, came digital TV, and some of us have been left with nothing, but radio. Limbaugh and Beck are still there.
Now, just as an important election is approaching, websites seem to be upgrading their technology, leaving those of us with older machines behind. Pages take longer to load, even locking up my machine. Ads cover stories, locking up my machine.
There are sites I’ve abandoned - sight obscuring ads drove me away from Salon and The Nation, registration drove me away from the New Republic and the Washington Post, locking machines threaten Salon and The Daily Beast, bad internet transfers force me out of Slate and Huffington Post.
What makes the owners of liberal websites thing advertisers like General Motors or General Electric Money really care if they destroy their web site so long as they get their message out for a few seconds. What makes them think rivals like the New York Times or The Economist really care if they survive? Don’t they think it worth while to hire someone, even in India, to constantly monitor their sites on all platforms?
Don’t they realize they’re as captivated by the market philosophy that says they’ve finally succeeded when they make money as those who brought on the mortgage crisis? That they’re no different than those who wanted to stay with an idea only until they sold the patent or issued an IPO, didn’t think it worthwhile to actually build something?
When given the choice of money or audience, they’ve been trained to think the first is the real affirmation of value.
And, then they wonder why conservatives are more effective at reaching the disenfranchised.
Even if the Drudge Report is also loading slowly and Fox is feuding with cheap cable networks, there’s still radio and Beck and Limbaugh to explain it all to the unhappy whose marginality is defined by the poor media they can afford.
If you want power, you don’t try to unify the bickering choir, you reach out to the apostate where ever they reside.
When FM radio gave better music production in the 1960's, the young and hip changed their dials. AM remained, often relying on all-news and talk shows. When laws changed, and the ownership of AM radio stations consolidated, programs like those of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck expanded their audience. Those without the money to buy FM radios heard only one side.
When cable appeared, the young and hip changed their habits. Network TV remained for those who couldn’t afford the monthly fees. Fox defined itself as a network and was there.
Then, came digital TV, and some of us have been left with nothing, but radio. Limbaugh and Beck are still there.
Now, just as an important election is approaching, websites seem to be upgrading their technology, leaving those of us with older machines behind. Pages take longer to load, even locking up my machine. Ads cover stories, locking up my machine.
There are sites I’ve abandoned - sight obscuring ads drove me away from Salon and The Nation, registration drove me away from the New Republic and the Washington Post, locking machines threaten Salon and The Daily Beast, bad internet transfers force me out of Slate and Huffington Post.
What makes the owners of liberal websites thing advertisers like General Motors or General Electric Money really care if they destroy their web site so long as they get their message out for a few seconds. What makes them think rivals like the New York Times or The Economist really care if they survive? Don’t they think it worth while to hire someone, even in India, to constantly monitor their sites on all platforms?
Don’t they realize they’re as captivated by the market philosophy that says they’ve finally succeeded when they make money as those who brought on the mortgage crisis? That they’re no different than those who wanted to stay with an idea only until they sold the patent or issued an IPO, didn’t think it worthwhile to actually build something?
When given the choice of money or audience, they’ve been trained to think the first is the real affirmation of value.
And, then they wonder why conservatives are more effective at reaching the disenfranchised.
Even if the Drudge Report is also loading slowly and Fox is feuding with cheap cable networks, there’s still radio and Beck and Limbaugh to explain it all to the unhappy whose marginality is defined by the poor media they can afford.
If you want power, you don’t try to unify the bickering choir, you reach out to the apostate where ever they reside.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Joe Klein - Right
Joe Klein recently interviewed nine people in Brighton, Michigan, whose mortgages were greater than the current values of their homes.
They were mainly people dependent on municipal budgets for their income (fire fighters, policemen, emergency response workers, lawyers) and they were angry that people they knew were able to benefit from the system when they could not or would not.
Such people have been squeezed from the right for years. When cities grew, some more vocal taxpayers were unwilling to subsidize the growth. They talked about economies of scale, which meant when a community doubled in size, area or population density, the number of people who provided essential services could not double.
People had to do more work for wages that were constantly under public attack.
When people cannot alter the pressures from above, they take solace from the gradations of status that separate them from others below. They only know the rich live in Grosse Pointe and send their children to ivy-league colleges; they don’t see the differences the wealthier do between different addresses or between Yale on the one hand, and Dartmouth on the other.
The differences they see are the ones that separate those making it from those living on the edge of poverty. They could buy their homes, not rent. They could eat meat without depending on food stamps. They could occasionally provide their families with small luxuries.
These status gradations have been under attack from the left, as government programs that provided safety nets tried to do so without stigma.
The anger they expressed to Klein arose from the elimination of such status markers. One person, a lawyer, was angry at a neighbor who used a scheduled layoff as the excuse to apply successfully for mortgage relief. She complained: "It was like she got a raise. She bought her kids a swing set."
When I checked Walmart’s website, simple metal swing sets begin at $129 and nicer wooden ones start at $249 and increase quickly. When I lived near Brighton, you shopped at Meijer’s Thrifty Acres. Their website advertises a metal set with some features of the wooden ones for $139.
A hundred dollars is half a day’s pay, before taxes, if you make $25 an hour.
A cheap swing set is a luxury for a family with a mortgage. A fancy one would indeed arouse the envy and anger Klein heard.
The important point Klein is reporting is that people have not just been squeezed by the economy. They’re also losing their sense of themselves when their social markers are destroyed.
Mortgages are the clearest example, because these people know when their neighbors walk away and banks foreclose, they, not the banks, are the ones who suffer when their homes lose value. Another of his sources, a deputy fire chief, said "It’s immoral," but isn’t punished. He added:
"You've got to figure that our parents wouldn't have walked away from a mortgage. I'm not walking away from mine. But people I know well, friends, are taking a hike, and I wonder, What has happened to us as people?"
What indeed, when a man squeezed by the economy loses whatever remains that makes him feel important?
He can’t see or influence the institutions or special interests who’ve been destroying the economy, but he does see the others every day, the ones who benefit from government programs intended to help. The loss they cause is personal.
Notes:
Klein, Joe. "On the Road: Underwater in Detroit," posted on Time website 16 September 2010; there were ten at the meeting.
They were mainly people dependent on municipal budgets for their income (fire fighters, policemen, emergency response workers, lawyers) and they were angry that people they knew were able to benefit from the system when they could not or would not.
Such people have been squeezed from the right for years. When cities grew, some more vocal taxpayers were unwilling to subsidize the growth. They talked about economies of scale, which meant when a community doubled in size, area or population density, the number of people who provided essential services could not double.
People had to do more work for wages that were constantly under public attack.
When people cannot alter the pressures from above, they take solace from the gradations of status that separate them from others below. They only know the rich live in Grosse Pointe and send their children to ivy-league colleges; they don’t see the differences the wealthier do between different addresses or between Yale on the one hand, and Dartmouth on the other.
The differences they see are the ones that separate those making it from those living on the edge of poverty. They could buy their homes, not rent. They could eat meat without depending on food stamps. They could occasionally provide their families with small luxuries.
These status gradations have been under attack from the left, as government programs that provided safety nets tried to do so without stigma.
The anger they expressed to Klein arose from the elimination of such status markers. One person, a lawyer, was angry at a neighbor who used a scheduled layoff as the excuse to apply successfully for mortgage relief. She complained: "It was like she got a raise. She bought her kids a swing set."
When I checked Walmart’s website, simple metal swing sets begin at $129 and nicer wooden ones start at $249 and increase quickly. When I lived near Brighton, you shopped at Meijer’s Thrifty Acres. Their website advertises a metal set with some features of the wooden ones for $139.
A hundred dollars is half a day’s pay, before taxes, if you make $25 an hour.
A cheap swing set is a luxury for a family with a mortgage. A fancy one would indeed arouse the envy and anger Klein heard.
The important point Klein is reporting is that people have not just been squeezed by the economy. They’re also losing their sense of themselves when their social markers are destroyed.
Mortgages are the clearest example, because these people know when their neighbors walk away and banks foreclose, they, not the banks, are the ones who suffer when their homes lose value. Another of his sources, a deputy fire chief, said "It’s immoral," but isn’t punished. He added:
"You've got to figure that our parents wouldn't have walked away from a mortgage. I'm not walking away from mine. But people I know well, friends, are taking a hike, and I wonder, What has happened to us as people?"
What indeed, when a man squeezed by the economy loses whatever remains that makes him feel important?
He can’t see or influence the institutions or special interests who’ve been destroying the economy, but he does see the others every day, the ones who benefit from government programs intended to help. The loss they cause is personal.
Notes:
Klein, Joe. "On the Road: Underwater in Detroit," posted on Time website 16 September 2010; there were ten at the meeting.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Joe Klein - Wrong
Every once in a while, someone will write something that calls into question his or her credibility as a reporter. Joe Klein had such a moment with a September 16 blog entry that Time headlined “On the Road: Underwater in Detroit.”
The article was drawn from a conversation with ten people he met in a restaurant in Brighton, described as a Detroit exurb, 40 miles from the city.
The Detroit metropolitan area is usually considered to include the city and Wayne County, along with Macomb County to the north, used by political reporters to represent auto workers, and Oakland County to the northwest, home of the more affluent.
Brighton’s in Livingston County.
When Michigan was settled, people moved to the best lands for farming. Roads and railroads followed, and with them more economic development. The state had been covered by glaciers that left moraines and swamps. Places like Livingston County were avoided as too rocky or wet.
It’s more representative of the under developed areas that exist between major metropolitan areas. It lies on the road from Detroit to Lansing, the capital and home of Oldsmobile. Similar land lies between Detroit and Flint to the north, between Detroit and Toledo to the south, and Detroit and Battle Creek to the west.
Bad lands have always nurtured malcontents. Livingston County was the home of Robert Miles, grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. The modern militia movement thrives in Livingston County along with Lenawee County to the south and Jackson County to the west.
The opinions of people from such areas are important to understand, but they should not be considered representative of places like Detroit suffering from deindustrialization. They are from areas that never accepted large factories, even when they had them.
Not only were Klein’s sources not from the Detroit geographic area, only one was associated with industry: John McGraw, described as “the former president of a small division of a power-tool company that was closed down by its European owners.” He lives in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, and was not at the meeting in Brighton. Klein met him separately.
The rest were “cops, firefighters, emergency responders and a few lawyers.” These people could be found in any small town, suburb or city in the country. They represent the middling class in nineteenth century small town life displaced by factory towns. Even when they live in large cities, they do not inhabit the industrial world signified by the word “Detroit.”
Klein was traveling cross country to learn more about the roots of the Tea Party anger. The success of his trip depended on the quality of the people who arranged his interviews. This one was done by Kevin Gentry, a “deputy fire chief and adjunct law professor at Michigan State” who practices law in Brighton.
The problem with Klein’s piece isn’t the sources or what he reports; it’s the context he provides, the repetition of the word Detroit in the first two paragraphs. The comments may well represent the views of people in Detroit or the auto industry, but they are not part of world he visited, and Klein doesn’t provide any quotes from such people to confirm that their experiences are shared.
Indeed, the only people he quoted were the former executive, a lawyer and a deputy police chief. If any of the people he met were commoners, or if any of them had opinions, we don’t know what they were. If they had differing views, they may not have expressed them in this gathering.
It was the job of Klein, or the people prepping him for these interviews, to learn more about the sociology of the area he was visiting.
The unwary reader could finish the article with a wrong impression.
For those like me, who grew up in areas that bordered one of the badlands or lived near Brighton for several years, the failure to know simple facts about the community is the failure that plants a seed of doubt about Klein’s reliability.
One may dismiss this as quibbling over details, but details are the very thing we use to judge reporters.
Notes: An Anti-Defamation League website lists events sponsored in 2010 by the Lenawee Militia, the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia in Brighton, and a neo-Nazi group, Battalion 14, in Jackson.
The article was drawn from a conversation with ten people he met in a restaurant in Brighton, described as a Detroit exurb, 40 miles from the city.
The Detroit metropolitan area is usually considered to include the city and Wayne County, along with Macomb County to the north, used by political reporters to represent auto workers, and Oakland County to the northwest, home of the more affluent.
Brighton’s in Livingston County.
When Michigan was settled, people moved to the best lands for farming. Roads and railroads followed, and with them more economic development. The state had been covered by glaciers that left moraines and swamps. Places like Livingston County were avoided as too rocky or wet.
It’s more representative of the under developed areas that exist between major metropolitan areas. It lies on the road from Detroit to Lansing, the capital and home of Oldsmobile. Similar land lies between Detroit and Flint to the north, between Detroit and Toledo to the south, and Detroit and Battle Creek to the west.
Bad lands have always nurtured malcontents. Livingston County was the home of Robert Miles, grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. The modern militia movement thrives in Livingston County along with Lenawee County to the south and Jackson County to the west.
The opinions of people from such areas are important to understand, but they should not be considered representative of places like Detroit suffering from deindustrialization. They are from areas that never accepted large factories, even when they had them.
Not only were Klein’s sources not from the Detroit geographic area, only one was associated with industry: John McGraw, described as “the former president of a small division of a power-tool company that was closed down by its European owners.” He lives in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, and was not at the meeting in Brighton. Klein met him separately.
The rest were “cops, firefighters, emergency responders and a few lawyers.” These people could be found in any small town, suburb or city in the country. They represent the middling class in nineteenth century small town life displaced by factory towns. Even when they live in large cities, they do not inhabit the industrial world signified by the word “Detroit.”
Klein was traveling cross country to learn more about the roots of the Tea Party anger. The success of his trip depended on the quality of the people who arranged his interviews. This one was done by Kevin Gentry, a “deputy fire chief and adjunct law professor at Michigan State” who practices law in Brighton.
The problem with Klein’s piece isn’t the sources or what he reports; it’s the context he provides, the repetition of the word Detroit in the first two paragraphs. The comments may well represent the views of people in Detroit or the auto industry, but they are not part of world he visited, and Klein doesn’t provide any quotes from such people to confirm that their experiences are shared.
Indeed, the only people he quoted were the former executive, a lawyer and a deputy police chief. If any of the people he met were commoners, or if any of them had opinions, we don’t know what they were. If they had differing views, they may not have expressed them in this gathering.
It was the job of Klein, or the people prepping him for these interviews, to learn more about the sociology of the area he was visiting.
The unwary reader could finish the article with a wrong impression.
For those like me, who grew up in areas that bordered one of the badlands or lived near Brighton for several years, the failure to know simple facts about the community is the failure that plants a seed of doubt about Klein’s reliability.
One may dismiss this as quibbling over details, but details are the very thing we use to judge reporters.
Notes: An Anti-Defamation League website lists events sponsored in 2010 by the Lenawee Militia, the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia in Brighton, and a neo-Nazi group, Battalion 14, in Jackson.
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