CJR: The health-care reform debate as Groundhog Day

It's been 26 years since health-care reform failed. Does the debate reflect anything that's happened since?

From The Columbia Journalism Review:

"The idea that we've made a great breakthrough just isn't so," says Jonathan Oberlander, a health-policy expert at the University of North Carolina. "Most of the plans today are direct descendants of what was proposed for the '93-'94 debate. The debate reminds me of one of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day.

With few exceptions, like the fine series last summer by NPR that explained how a number of other countries handle health care, the press has done little to challenge this reality or help to broaden the health-care debate. Rather, it has mostly passed along the pronouncements of politicians and the major stakeholders who have the most to lose from wholesale reform. By not challenging the status quo, the press has so far foreclosed a vibrant discussion of the full range of options, and also has not dug deeply into the few that are being discussed, thereby leaving citizens largely uninformed about an issue that will affect us all.

[and]

Absent from the debate are not only single-payer systems like the ones in England and Canada, but other systems with multiple payers, like ones in Germany and Japan--or, for that matter, any discussion of why a system that relies on competition among private insurers in The Netherlands hasn't resulted in lower prices for consumers, as advocates claimed. What's common to all these systems is that everyone is entitled to health care and pays taxes to support the system, and medical costs are controlled by limits on spending. The specter of a system that takes a significant bite out of stakeholder profits in the U.S. is the real reason the debate is so restricted.