I'm really interested to learn how the Americans on this forum would like to comment on this article. 
I've translated it myself completely. (Some sort of a crazy hobby of mine.)
NRC.Next - Tuesday, september 8th, 2009
It seemed such a good idea
But against 75,000 lobbyists Obama can't compete
* American insurers asked their employees to protest against the health care reforms.
* And it worked: the general public took it on.
By Tom-Jan Meeus
WASHINGTON. Judging on his function Barack Obama has leadership over the United States. But if there's something that has become clear this summer, it's that the president is not (or at least not yet) able to cope with other power bases in America, such as the town of Wasila (Alaska), Facebook and a group of fifty anonymous lobbyists on Pennsylvania Anevue 701 in Washington.
___The result is that Obama, after a relatively carefree first half year, is in real trouble for the first time. His most important domestic issue, the health care reforms, threatens to turn into a failure.
___Obama would reduce the costs of this over-expensive system. And he would guarantee a health care insurance for everyone; at present 46 million Americans are not insured.
___But after weeks of protests of enraged Americans the support for the plans started to diminish. Obama will try tomorrow [pretty soon by now, Matrix] to regain initiative with a speech. But the White House has already revealed that the ambitions will be adjusted.
___What happened? A glance of what happened behind the scenes of the protests has been revealed when e-mails of two of the largest insurers leaked out, WellPoint and UnitedHealth. It showed that the companies called on their employees to ignite resistance - "Make a move today!"
___On paper the participation wasn't compulsory. But reality is another matter, as Judy Dugan of Consumer Watchdog, a comsumer organisation that disclosed the companies' letters, explains. The 75,000 employees where asked to contact the pr-branch of the company. The management could therefore stay up to date on who participated and who didn't. "Thus all employees knew they had no choice."
___That way UnitedHealth transformed it's 75,000 employees into 'mini-lobbyists', says Dugan. "A campaign on an unprecedented scale."
___It's a practice which is known in the US as astroturf: inciting protest, hoping that the general public will take it on. Obama knows this method all too well. As a community worker in Chicago he stirred eighty inhabitants of run-down districts using similar means in the early eighties. And also during his campaigns against Hillary Clinton and John McCain last year he used this method, for example by making the support of average civilians and 'small' financiers seems much larger than they actually appeared to be later on.
___In short, the president got a taste of his own medicine this summer. "Indeed", sais Dugan. But according to her there's a difference. Companies such as UnitedHealth don't limit themselves to astroturf. They also have the financial means to bend the debate to their will. "It's depressively effective how they managed to pull the heart out of the plans in just a couple of weeks."
___The nerve centre of this operation is located on Pennsylvania Avenue 701, Washington DC, baroc premises between the Congress and the White House. From the outside one cannot tell fifty lobbyists work here for UnitedHealth, but these are the people that managed to decapitate the plans this summer.
___Still the insurers went into battle with uncertainty. Due to a spectacular rise of the premiums in the last couple of years, and thousands of incidents where the insured persons where not paid over, Americans no longer took their word for it. "People hate insurers", says Trudy Lieberman, researcher at the Columbia University who blogs for the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) about the role of the media in the health care debate.
___Obana wanted to deal with the insurers. According to him it is essential that insurers, who are monopolists in many regions, face new competition; the best way to press the prices. To get this done he wants to establish a state enterprise which offers insurance policies at a lower tariff. In the Washington language: the 'public option'.
___This 'public option' will only come into being if all sixty Democratic senators support him - thus preventing a Republican blockade. Therefore UnitedHealth aimed to ease the Democratic senators off Obama. They hauled in Tom Daschle as advisor, a confidant of the president who didn't become secretary of health due to a tax affaire.
___The first Democrat to drop out was a senator of North Dakota, Kent Conrad, who presented as an alternative to the 'public option' a plan inserted to him by UnitedHealth some time before. Another senator, Mark Warner from Virginia, turned against the 'public option'. Research has proven, he said, that insurers would lose no less than 88 million clients. This research, that has played a major part in the discussion, was executed by a subsidiary of UnitedHealth.
___In similar fashion more and more Democrats declared themselves against the 'public option' and Obama has expressed his doubts for the feasibility. Officially it's still in the plans, but even the most fiery proponents are starting to lose hope. At the same time there is still a chance that the aim to guarantee a health insurance for every American will be reached.
___Without the 'public option' the disadvantage for the government will be that the market (and costs) will rise even further. But for the insurers it would be game, set and match: no new competition, but rather millions of new clients.
___The extraordinary things is, says Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review, that the American media hardly pays any attention to this. "The public is drawn into the hands of the companies they despise, and the media are endlessly occupied with side issues."
___The notorious side issue was the intervention of Sarah Palin, who played a major part in the crumbling support of the plans. In august the running mate of McCain in 2008 wrote on her Facebook page that the health care plans contain "death panels" who would decide whether elderly and handicapped children would still receive health care. "Simply malicious", wrote Palin from her house in Wasila, Alaska.
___Most of the 'old' media told that Palin's assertions were wrong. But that didn't help. Reseach shows that almost half the population thinks Palins assertions are based on the truth. Not just the viewers of FoxNews, also 57 percent of the CNN-audience, even though CNN itself showed that Palin was telling nonsense.
___Once something is on Facebook, the 'old' media seems only to be capable prick into the mythologization. Another part in this matter, according to Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review, was that journalists found Palin's intervention so "juicy" that they returned to it endlessly. The fact that in their defense they also let her critics speak only shows that there's something fundamentally wrong with the procedures of the American journalists, she says. "It's sham objectivity. The reader of viewer is supposed to decide for themselves what to think. But it doesn't work that way."
___This summer revealed more impotence of the 'old' media. Not only it's clear now that the furious protest gatherings are the product of astroturf, we now also know this anger - partly acted, partly for real - finds it's way to the media. Amateur filmers captured all incidents, placed them on YouTube and Republicans increased the number of hits with improper means, after which the broadcasting stations copied them.
___Judy Dugan saw it happen with pain in her heart. Before she started leading the research department of Consumer Watch, she was in the editorial staff of the Los Angeles Times. She was part of a team that won the Pulitzer price. Still she can talk with passion about the ways the news paper made fame with research about the insurance industry. But when she left, the news paper was in death agonies, and still is. "We are experiencing the decay of the journalism in this country", she says. The course of the health care debate is consequence of this. "And the problem is: we don't know how to act on this."
__________________
[Insets:]
[And then there's a graph that shows:] Insured Americans in 2007 in millions of persons:
Via employer: 158
Uninsured: 46
Medicare*: 42
Medicaid**: 37
Privately: 15
*Medicare is a federal health care fund for elderly and chronically sick patients.
**Medicaid is a fund for lowest-paid workers and their possible children.
I've translated it myself completely. (Some sort of a crazy hobby of mine.)NRC.Next - Tuesday, september 8th, 2009
It seemed such a good idea
But against 75,000 lobbyists Obama can't compete
* American insurers asked their employees to protest against the health care reforms.
* And it worked: the general public took it on.
By Tom-Jan Meeus
WASHINGTON. Judging on his function Barack Obama has leadership over the United States. But if there's something that has become clear this summer, it's that the president is not (or at least not yet) able to cope with other power bases in America, such as the town of Wasila (Alaska), Facebook and a group of fifty anonymous lobbyists on Pennsylvania Anevue 701 in Washington.
___The result is that Obama, after a relatively carefree first half year, is in real trouble for the first time. His most important domestic issue, the health care reforms, threatens to turn into a failure.
___Obama would reduce the costs of this over-expensive system. And he would guarantee a health care insurance for everyone; at present 46 million Americans are not insured.
___But after weeks of protests of enraged Americans the support for the plans started to diminish. Obama will try tomorrow [pretty soon by now, Matrix] to regain initiative with a speech. But the White House has already revealed that the ambitions will be adjusted.
___What happened? A glance of what happened behind the scenes of the protests has been revealed when e-mails of two of the largest insurers leaked out, WellPoint and UnitedHealth. It showed that the companies called on their employees to ignite resistance - "Make a move today!"
___On paper the participation wasn't compulsory. But reality is another matter, as Judy Dugan of Consumer Watchdog, a comsumer organisation that disclosed the companies' letters, explains. The 75,000 employees where asked to contact the pr-branch of the company. The management could therefore stay up to date on who participated and who didn't. "Thus all employees knew they had no choice."
___That way UnitedHealth transformed it's 75,000 employees into 'mini-lobbyists', says Dugan. "A campaign on an unprecedented scale."
___It's a practice which is known in the US as astroturf: inciting protest, hoping that the general public will take it on. Obama knows this method all too well. As a community worker in Chicago he stirred eighty inhabitants of run-down districts using similar means in the early eighties. And also during his campaigns against Hillary Clinton and John McCain last year he used this method, for example by making the support of average civilians and 'small' financiers seems much larger than they actually appeared to be later on.
___In short, the president got a taste of his own medicine this summer. "Indeed", sais Dugan. But according to her there's a difference. Companies such as UnitedHealth don't limit themselves to astroturf. They also have the financial means to bend the debate to their will. "It's depressively effective how they managed to pull the heart out of the plans in just a couple of weeks."
'Make a move today!', the insurers e-mailed to their employees
___Still the insurers went into battle with uncertainty. Due to a spectacular rise of the premiums in the last couple of years, and thousands of incidents where the insured persons where not paid over, Americans no longer took their word for it. "People hate insurers", says Trudy Lieberman, researcher at the Columbia University who blogs for the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) about the role of the media in the health care debate.
___Obana wanted to deal with the insurers. According to him it is essential that insurers, who are monopolists in many regions, face new competition; the best way to press the prices. To get this done he wants to establish a state enterprise which offers insurance policies at a lower tariff. In the Washington language: the 'public option'.
___This 'public option' will only come into being if all sixty Democratic senators support him - thus preventing a Republican blockade. Therefore UnitedHealth aimed to ease the Democratic senators off Obama. They hauled in Tom Daschle as advisor, a confidant of the president who didn't become secretary of health due to a tax affaire.
___The first Democrat to drop out was a senator of North Dakota, Kent Conrad, who presented as an alternative to the 'public option' a plan inserted to him by UnitedHealth some time before. Another senator, Mark Warner from Virginia, turned against the 'public option'. Research has proven, he said, that insurers would lose no less than 88 million clients. This research, that has played a major part in the discussion, was executed by a subsidiary of UnitedHealth.
___In similar fashion more and more Democrats declared themselves against the 'public option' and Obama has expressed his doubts for the feasibility. Officially it's still in the plans, but even the most fiery proponents are starting to lose hope. At the same time there is still a chance that the aim to guarantee a health insurance for every American will be reached.
___Without the 'public option' the disadvantage for the government will be that the market (and costs) will rise even further. But for the insurers it would be game, set and match: no new competition, but rather millions of new clients.
___The extraordinary things is, says Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review, that the American media hardly pays any attention to this. "The public is drawn into the hands of the companies they despise, and the media are endlessly occupied with side issues."
___The notorious side issue was the intervention of Sarah Palin, who played a major part in the crumbling support of the plans. In august the running mate of McCain in 2008 wrote on her Facebook page that the health care plans contain "death panels" who would decide whether elderly and handicapped children would still receive health care. "Simply malicious", wrote Palin from her house in Wasila, Alaska.
___Most of the 'old' media told that Palin's assertions were wrong. But that didn't help. Reseach shows that almost half the population thinks Palins assertions are based on the truth. Not just the viewers of FoxNews, also 57 percent of the CNN-audience, even though CNN itself showed that Palin was telling nonsense.
___Once something is on Facebook, the 'old' media seems only to be capable prick into the mythologization. Another part in this matter, according to Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review, was that journalists found Palin's intervention so "juicy" that they returned to it endlessly. The fact that in their defense they also let her critics speak only shows that there's something fundamentally wrong with the procedures of the American journalists, she says. "It's sham objectivity. The reader of viewer is supposed to decide for themselves what to think. But it doesn't work that way."
'Old media' are unable to refute false rumours about the new plans
___Judy Dugan saw it happen with pain in her heart. Before she started leading the research department of Consumer Watch, she was in the editorial staff of the Los Angeles Times. She was part of a team that won the Pulitzer price. Still she can talk with passion about the ways the news paper made fame with research about the insurance industry. But when she left, the news paper was in death agonies, and still is. "We are experiencing the decay of the journalism in this country", she says. The course of the health care debate is consequence of this. "And the problem is: we don't know how to act on this."
__________________
[Insets:]
- During the summer recess of the Congress, 'town hall meetings' were held. Republican and Democratic senators explained in halls in their home states to the voters what their opinions on Obama's health care reforms were.
- Republicans tried to disturb these meetings with critical questions and booing.
- Also progressives did their best to influence the legislative process. Due to the debate on health care the social contrast between between Democrats and Republicans blazed up.
- The Republicans were mentally supported by Obama's declining popularity in the polls. He no longer gets the towering rating he had during the first months of his presidency. A poll of research bureau Gallup showed that 43 percent is in favour of Obama's approach, while 49 percent is not.
- Meanwhile a majority of the Americans is in favour of change in the health care system; 70 percent according to a recent inquiry of Times Magazine. 65 percent is even in favour of the 'public option'.
[And then there's a graph that shows:] Insured Americans in 2007 in millions of persons:
Via employer: 158
Uninsured: 46
Medicare*: 42
Medicaid**: 37
Privately: 15
*Medicare is a federal health care fund for elderly and chronically sick patients.
**Medicaid is a fund for lowest-paid workers and their possible children.
) And who pays for the news these days? Most people read freely spread (crappy) news papers and just watch the news on tv.
)
