One of the drawbacks of living in the Richmond area is the dearth of penetrating reporting in
the local daily rag. Luckily for me, The New York Times finally started home delivery last week in the piney woods edge of Chesterfield County where I have lived for the past nine years.
True, I get the Wall Street Journal, which is great in its own way, but one really needs a counter balance to the increasingly awful Richmond Times-Dispatch which is shamelessly biased in favor of some crazed concept of “Richmond” as defined by its arrogant and out-of-touch publisher and constant cheer leading for the home-town boy congressman Eric Cantor, whose wife sits on the board of the owner of the newspaper.
So, it is strange that one has to get local insights from the Times, specifically from one of my favorite columnists, Frank Rich, who has ties to Richmond and helped edit the scrappy Richmond Mercury alternative newspaper many moons ago.
In his Sunday column, Rich took apart Cantor and his ties to big health insurance companies. As House Minority Whip, Cantor is leading the charge against any “public option” to provide customers with an alternative to private health insurance. The for-profit companies have benefited immensely from “managed care” that got its start back int he 1970s with the view that doctors and other professionals could not contain costs.
But with managed care, big companies such as UnitedHealth Group have enjoyed tremendous pricing power sometimes demanding double digit hikes in premiums in a system that no can understand, let alone challenge.
President Barack Obama wants a complete overhaul but has botched the job so badly that people like Cantor can easily do the bidding of the powerful insurance companies. Cantor and his fellow conservatives have led a charge against the “public option” which will probably get dumped as legislators try to merge parts of five separate House and Senate bills into one.
But let’s back up. Cantor comes down strongly against the public option. According to Rich of the Times, Cantor regularly cites data bashing the public option from the research firm Lewin Group. The firm claims that if there were a public option, some 88 million Americans might bolt from their private plans. Big Insurance doesn’t like the idea of such competition so they are marshaling their messenger boys such as Cantor to shout it down. Never mind that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that only about 11 million people with private insurance would switch to a government alternative if one were available.
Let’s connect some dots:
- The Lewin Group is wholly owned by UnitedHealth Group. So, one might question the sanctity of the data it projects.
- More specifically, according to The Washington Post, Lewin Group is part of a UnitedHealth subsidiary called Ingenix which has been accused by the New York attorney general of helping insurers shift medical expenses to customers by monkeying data. True the New York AGs office is pretty activist, but even the venerable and conservative American Medical Association makes the exact, same accusation. Lewin officials told the Post that Lewin had nothing to do with the scheme but had had “adjustment” issues when it was bought by UnitedHealth in 2007.
- Speaking of UnitedHealth, guess whose political campaigns it bankrolls? Eric Cantor’s, that who. The Huffington Post reported in August that Cantor and fellow GOP leader Rep. John Boehner of Ohio have taken roughly $60,000 in contributions from UnitedHealth. Cantor got something like $28,000. The Huff Post said that a Cantor aide labelled the contribution story as a “distraction.
Guess where one never reads anything about these odd strands of thread? The Richmond Times-Dispatch, that’s where.
On Sept. 21, the newspaper held another one of its Phil Donahue shows with the publisher plays emcee featuring Cantor and Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott talking about health care reform.
The newspaper repeated several times the opinions of the politicians and those of some of the citizen attendees, who were patronized horribly by the publisher when he said they were “civil” as if the the general public were third graders who might pee on a potted plant if given the chance.
It’s too bad the newspaper keeps dumbing down its reporting to the readers it is supposed to serve instead of actually reporting on the politicians it is supposed to watch. Holding Donahue shows is a lot cheaper than keeping on veteran reporters who might have the wit and skill to look at some campaign contribution reports.
And it is too bad that when it comes to Eric Cantor, The Richmond Times-Dispatch comes like off like Richmondesque Pravda, the official mouthpiece of the ruling local political party.
Peter Galuszka
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