When moderators on MSNBC framed Medicare-for-All as “government-run healthcare” during the first Democratic presidential debates, they advanced right-wing talking points and revealed implicit bias. HEAL California highly recommends NESRI’s authoritative, historical analysis of how insurance industry lobbyists and Republican strategists developed the language used by the media today to skew public opinion against publicly-financed, private-delivered health care.
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By Ben Palmquist, Campaign Manager
National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI)
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REPORT:
Media Repeating Insurance Industry Talking Points
Media and opinion polls have regularly described the key health policy decisions facing the country as a choice between government and private insurance. This misrepresentation depicts a choice between demonized “government health care” versus “private insurance” in which insurance companies are rendered invisible. In fact, the term “government health insurance” obscures the role corporations play in weakening programs we traditionally think of as public. It biases public-opinion polls and reporting, skews public understanding, shields insurance companies from public scrutiny, and warps democratic decision-making.
By reviewing leaked memos and more than thirty years of news reports and public-opinion polls, NESRI reveals that journalists, pollsters, and scholars only adopted this framing after the insurance industry crafted it and, with a cadre of Republican strategists and right-wing think tanks and media, pressed it into common use.
Nonpartisan media, polling, and policy organizations have an obligation to drop the insurance industry’s biased framing. They can do this by naming the role of both government and insurance companies in the health care system, or by contrasting private with public insurance.
Read NESRI’s full report, Parroting The Right: How media and polling company adoption of insurance industry spin warps democracy. Then take action, and demand media stop repeating right wing talking points!
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National Economic & Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) works to build a broad movement for economic and social rights, providing multi-disciplinary and direct support to partners’ campaigns, developing leadership pipelines, learning cultures and the full integration of a human rights organizing approach and shifting the debate on the need for public goods, equity and inclusion of all communities and democratizing power and wealth.
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HEAL California is an independent news and information hub focused on the California Medicare for All movement. We feature non-partisan news, views, podcasts and videos that highlight the continuing failures of our broken healthcare system and elevate the voices of advocates and organizations fighting for change.
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