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Does Personalized News Lead To Ignorance?
blackbearnh writes "As newspapers struggle to survive and local broadcasts try to find a way to compete with cable news, more and more news outlets are banking on what people want to hear about, rather than what they need to hear. Thoughtful analysis of problems is being pushed out of the way to make room for more celebrity gossip. Electronic news guru Chris Lee thinks that as people get news increasingly tailored to their tastes, the overall knowledge of important issues is plummeting. 'I think one of the observations about how consumers are behaving in the past five years that has surprised me the most is, again, this lack of feeling responsible for knowing the news of their country and their local government of that day. I don't think it's just a technology question. I think if you asked people now versus the same age group 20 years ago, I think they'd be stunningly less informed now about boring news, and tremendously more knowledgeable about bits of news that really interest them.'"
If you take the issue of 'death panels' with an open mind, for example, you will find that there is some substance to the fear that underlies it. In a given system with limited resources, someone has to decide who lives and who dies. In a capitalist system this decision is based on who can pay for the treatments and who cannot. In some other system it would be dealt with in some other way, but with limits on the resources it will have to be dealt with.
Of course this is true that there is always rationing going on. Right now your coverage gets decided by insurance company bean counters and lawyers with profit in mind. In a government-run system it would be a bureaucrat with financial solvency in mind (assuming the system is required to pay for itself like it was proposed).
However, that's not what the "death panels" term referred to when it was started by Palin. She was referring to the end-of-life counseling that was to be covered by Medicare. Betsy McCaughey took this idea of allowing patients to be covered for time spent discussing their wishes for end of life treatment and living wills with their doctors and turned it into some kind of government push for euthanization. It was completely baseless and had no evidence whatsoever to back it up. Palin was referring to this analysis when she first used the term "death panels". So the term is not about rationing, but about the coercion of old and sick folks to consent to euthanization.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
A big part of the problem is being dependent upon a bureaucracy to begin with. If someone else controls the decision of whether you get treatment or not, you're screwed. Doesn't matter who cuts the bureaucrat's paycheck, they still will think they know better than you what *you* need.
You'll still have all the horror stories about people denied care. So what will happen in the government insurance is the same thing that happened with the private insurance (HMOs). At first they try to hold the line on spending, which means they start denying you the ability to get the more expensive treatments. Which upsets everyone and creates all sort of political pressures and/or legislation about what must be covered. So then the insurers start denying less care, but have to charge people more to cover those added costs. So then you have less complaints about denied care, but more and more people who can't afford coverage at all.
So then you have to extend government subsidies to more and more people so they can get covered. But you soon get to the point where you're subsidizing nearly everyone. Subsidizing everyone is the same as subsidizing nobody - the money's just flowing out through our taxes and back in via the subsidy.
You hit the brick wall of reality that we don't have as much money in the whole system as we have health needs. The demand is effectively infinite and our funds are not.
So we are faced with a choice: either we try to centrally plan who gets what care, or we give people the amount of money we can spare for their condition and let them decide how best to spend it. Either you decide what's the best care you can get for the available money, or the bureaucrat does. But one way or the other, we're not going to get all the care we want. And that's what no politician is willing to admit to us.