I must confess; I\u2019m a semi-secret fan of the mainstream press. This is not because I admire its approach to the news. Rather, I think that the mainstream accepts the conservative mantra that all is well so long as the government doesn\u2019t intervene. My soft spot for the mainstream is nostalgia; I grew up with it. The descendants of Huntley-Brinkley and Uncle Walter are no match for their elders, but all the same, I prefer to first receive news from sources that were my initial introduction to \u201cnews.\u201d<\/p>\n
CNN is not far behind; it celebrated its thirty-third birthday this year. That\u2019s the combined ages of Fox News and MSNBC. It purports to be politically neutral, and it certainly is as much so as the three broadcast networks (damnation by faint praise). However, if you\u2019re able to dig into the network\u2019s on-line platform, you can often find links to progressive thinking. Such was recently the case as I found a link to a post by Paul Waldman of CNN, \u201cThe health care reality conservatives ignore<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Waldman points out how liberally the conservatives criticize the Affordable Care Act. Whether or not there is any merit to their contention that it is flawed, they have no alternative to suggest save just repealing it. That means that we would go back to a system of virtually unfettered capitalism in which private insurance companies offered plans that would only elevate their profit margins, regardless of what kind of care of accessibility citizens were left with. As Waldman says:<\/p>\n In the American system, there are multiple points where companies do the rational thing: Extract as much money as possible from the system. That’s why an MRI costs<\/a> three times as much in the U.S. as it does in France or Holland.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The rational thing for private enterprise to do is to increase profits; the rational thing for a government program like Medicare to do is to optimize care to as many people as possible at minimal cost. Which better serves the public? As Waldman says:<\/p>\n