Critical condition in medical terminology means a patient has a high risk of death that could occur within the next 24 hours. ABC used those two words to make the American medical system sound terrible and to promote universal, government-run health insurance.
The three-night series on “World News with Charles Gibson” December 10-12 was called: “Critical Condition: Rx for
Using a one-sided panel as well as ABC’s own proponent of universal care, “World News,” pushed its big government agenda. Charles Gibson cited American’s dissatisfaction with “health care” and acknowledged it would be a major issue in the 2008 election.
“Much of the political debate next year will be about health care,” anchor Charles Gibson said on the December 10 “World News.” “Three-quarters of Americans say they’re dissatisfied with the system and that providing health care for all Americans is more important than holding down taxes.”
“World News” hosted a biased panel that included three socialized medicine cheerleaders and no one from any other viewpoint: Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Foundation, Gail Wilensky of Project Hope, who once ran Medicare according to Gibson and Karen Davis, president of The Commonwealth Fund.
Gibson described the three as people “who know the issues as well as anyone in
The second night of the series took a partisan tone favoring Democrats.
“The Democrat plans are going cover 40 to 45 million people,”
Unsurprisingly, ABC’s medical editor Dr. Tim Johnson, a supporter of the original “Hillary Care,” referred to the Democrats as “committed” to universal coverage, but did admit “The cost of their plans are significant. Estimates range from $60 to 110 billion a year.”
The high-end $110 billion plan was the brainchild of the Hillary Clinton campaign – a plan she wants to make possible [1]by rolling back President George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts for the top two tax brackets.
Despite such high costs, Johnson was still touting universal care on December 12 – this time citing the Veterans Administration (V.A.) as an example of efficiency. “It’s a system that works,” chimed Charles Gibson.
Using electronic medical records as a reason, ABC once again promoted socialized medicine with a dash of patriotism throw in.
As soldiers in uniform paraded across the screen Johnson said, “Socialized medicine may sound un-American, but in fact, it’s exactly what we provide to our American heroes – the more than 5 million armed service veterans. They get health care that’s both paid for by the government and delivered by the government. It’s the V.A. health care system.”
“First and foremost, by pioneering electronic medical records,” Phil Longman said on the December 12 “World News” when asked how the “once-maligned” V.A. hospital system transformed itself. “Which is a much bigger deal than it might sound like.”
[2]Longman is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, an organization that also [3]supports universal health care, though ABC didn’t say that. Instead, Longman was referred to as a “health care expert” and the author of “Best Care Anywhere.”
Some of the panelists cited the misleading “47 million uninsured” statistic – implying that those 47 million are Americans. But as BMI has previously written, census data states that the number includes 9.487 million people who are “not a citizen.” Subtracting the roughly 10 million non-Americans puts [4] the number of uninsured Americans much lower at about 37 million.