Thinking about that, I would draw a parallel from a different topic, children's literature. Back when my child was in elementary school, I became interested in children's books. So since I was doing research at the Library of Congress anyway, I decided to poke around and see whether I could turn up any really interesting children's books, not too dated or otherwise hokey, like about trains. Results were mixed: I found a title that looked promising, checked the book� ��"and it wasn't really about trains at all. It was anti-labor propaganda disguised as children's fiction. The moral of the story was obvious: the union organizer amidst the other stalwart railroad workers in the book was this great hulking brute, smelling of beer, perhaps foul-mouthed (by implication), sulky. A ne'er-do-well malcontent. The book was really just an example of management in one business� ��"publishing� ��"looking out for management in another� ��"railroads. Too bad; I love publishing and railroads, myself.
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The parallel is that for more than thirty years, we've had basically that quality of publishing on insurance abuses: It's been management in news media protecting management in the insurance sector. Mostly the whole issue� ��"� ��˜insurance' that did not insure--just did not get reported. Insurance execs like other execs got paid better and better, more and more risks got legally excluded from the pool, and premiums just kept rising, while the big media outlets pretty much let it slide. Big media outlets seldom or never attributed � ��˜the rising costs of health care' to the rising cost of health insurance, even while the business press routinely reported that premiums were rising, were projected to rise, had risen, etc. (N.b.: Have you ever seen premiums go down? Anywhere? In your life?) Astronomical malpractice premiums are still not being written about. And, generally, the news media do not even report how many claims a company denies, an item that would be useful for comparison shopping. But comparison shopping among insurance companies is nearly impossible anyway when one or two or a few companies dominate the market in a state.
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The consolidation of news media in few
hands is part of the problem. The biggest newspapers in the U.S.� ��"the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington
Post� ��"all tend either to have a pro-corporate bent or to separate their
business reporting from their reporting on public policy. (The Post recently began putting its business
articles in the front section, a move for financial reasons that has improved
coverage in my opinion.)
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The WP in particular, the paper I get, went for decades literally without mentioning insurance bad faith. Literally: I checked LexisNexis, and the last time the Post mentioned bad faith in insurance was 1986. The WP, which also has had a longstanding corporate relationship with insurance magnate Warren Buffett, very recently ran an article on � ��˜rescissions,' and it was a first for them. These big newspapers produce the reports that other newspapers in turn run, and they own other papers, or their parent companies do� ��"the Times company owns the august Boston Globe; the Tribune company owns the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and numerous smaller papers including some in Maryland and Virginia, where the WP also owns the local Gazette chain. Hasn't worked out well for the mid-Atlantic. None of this has worked out well for policyholders.
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Boiling down all the above, when you've got superficial glamour/thrill and entrenched corporate interests both contending against a public policy perspective, it's generally not going to work out well for the public, in news media.
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Let's pause here. When we return we'll talk about the current legislation before Congress. Please join us!
Part two of my interview with Margie
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