Forget
In a June 14 New York Times article titled “A Dirt-Poor Nation, With a Health Plan,” reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. celebrated the African nation’s “national health insurance” that covers “92 percent of the population with just $2 premiums.” McNeil used this statistic to criticize American coverage, but buried facts that showed
“Sunny Ntayomba, an editorial writer for The New Times, a newspaper based in the capital, Kigali, is aware of the paradox: his nation, one of the world’s poorest, insures more of its citizens than the world’s richest does,” McNeil wrote.
“He met an American college student passing through last year, and found it ‘absurd, ridiculous, that I have health insurance and she didn’t,’ he said, adding: ‘And if she got sick, her parents might go bankrupt. The saddest thing was the way she shrugged her shoulders and just hoped not to fall sick.’”
McNeil promoted
However, McNeil buried the negative aspects, such as a waiting list for surgeries, which are similar to other universal health care systems around the world, deeper in the story.
“General surgery is done, but waits can be weeks long,” he acknowledged. “A few lucky patients needing advanced surgery may be treated free by teams of visiting doctors from the
Still, McNeil waited until 17 paragraphs into his story to answer the ultimate question on this seemingly magical health care system: how any nation can offer “so much” care for $2 per year?
“The answer: It can’t. Not without outside help.”
Not only does
Nevertheless, McNeil doesn’t pass up an opportunity to take a closing shot at the U.S health system:
“Still, Dr. Binagwaho said,
McNeil did not mention that while
Yet all of this begs the question: if the media got the health reform it so steadfastly championed, why are they still writing stories criticizing the U.S health care system?
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