Media Spin

Dean Baker has come up with another wonderful example of how media spin a story to leave a false impression. Here is a bit from a posting on his Beat The Press blog:

The Washington Post gets to the bottom of Japan's health care system quoting a professor of health policy that: "more than one-third of the workers' premiums are used to transfer wealth from the young, healthy and rich to the old, unhealthy and poor."

That's a striking statement. Fire insurance transfers wealth from people who don't have house fires to people who do. Car insurance transfers money from people who don't have car accidents to people who do. This is the basic concept of insurance. It protects people from bad events, transferring money from people who don't have bad events to those who do. In other words, this quote is telling us that Japan's health insurance system is operating like a health insurance system.

This would be funny if it weren't so tragic. The Washington Post is the voice of the elite who don't want government to work for people. They want to keep it focused on servicing the top 0.2% of the population. For them, healthcare is a waste of money. Their priorities are more tax cuts, more bailouts, more deregulation, bigger government troughs to let the rich feed at, etc.