On Monday, the Washington Post published a Letter To The Editor from James Floyd, a "a physician and a health researcher for Public Citizen, which supports single-payer national health insurance." He wrote the Post complaining of a recent Dana Milbank column on a House subcommittee hearing on the single payer health care option. In his letter, Floyd accused Milbank of being "polemical," and of ignoring or glossing over several pertinent details of the hearing:
First, many attendees were congressional staff members, not single-payer advocates.
Second, to describe the testimony of witnesses, which included Rep. John Conyers Jr., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, as mere "venting" and "an exercise in blowing off steam" was offensive to the millions of Americans whose views they represent.
Third, Rep. Dennis Kucinich's grilling of the Manhattan Institute's David Gratzer was justified by Mr. Gratzer's selective use of statistics to portray a falsely grim picture of the Canadian single-payer system. Certainly, a national system of health insurance that guarantees comprehensive access to needed care and eliminates profit is anathema to someone who cheerleads the intellectually and morally bankrupt "consumer-driven health care" movement.
Finally, to decry a national system of health-care financing that retains the private delivery of health care as socialism simply plays into the propaganda and fear-mongering of the right and the private insurance lobby, which opposes any challenge to its obscene profits.
So what was going on? Well, naturally, I had to go and read the Milbank column in question, an experience that's typically akin to eating those magic jellybeans from the Harry Potter books -- sometimes they go down tasty and pleasant, but just as often, you get one that tastes like snot, or vomit, or taint, or whatever. But after reading the Milbank piece, I think some translation is in order.
See, I don't think the piece was very "polemical." I tend to think that you have to know something about a issue, or care about an issue in a significant way, to be polemical. And there's just no evidence that Milbank knows or cares enough about single payer health care to have ascended a soapbox about it to dispense "polemics." Maybe he does! What he knows best is what is put on display here: the conventional wisdom stuff, that the single payer option is off the table because "OMGZ, PANIC IT'S TEH SOCIALISM," and that people like Dennis Kucinich are super-funny, with their liberal pipe dreams, and that it's fun to watch everyone have a shiny, shiny fight in subcommittees.
With these columns of his, it's important to not pretend that you are reading "journalism," in the sense that you are going to get a straight-up account of what happened, informed by research or a keen grasp of an issue. These are best read just hazy and entertaining interpretations of events that form a magical mosaic of the wonderful world inside the Beltway, where arguments over policy are bright and adorable and everyone's always playing King Of The Mountain and the actual people who are affected in their daily lives by the decisions that get made here are just far-off abstractions, dancing in the ether.
Once you learn this, these columns won't seem so bad. You'll just accept that from time to time, someone will be misquoted or that the author will pretend to not know a basic fact -- like the traditions surrounding Presidential transition offices.
The column is called "Washington Sketch" and it is written by one.
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