Reporters lack common sense, among other things

My brain felt like it was turning to mush the last few days from shaking my head. Nothing really new except reporters have gotten worse over the years and not better. Do they really have to teach common sense in journalism class? Start with the Affordable Healthcare Act they love to call Obamacare because too many in this country think they are two different things. Obama got blamed and took it on the chin for something that wasn't his fault but hey, the press jumped on the fact he said people could keep their plans. That didn't mean insurance companies would do the right thing. Here's someone actually using common sense.

Obama never lied about your plan
Terminated policies were introduced after ACA's passing -- often with insurers' knowledge they'd be scrapped
DEAN BAKER
ALTERNET
November 15, 2013

President Obama has been getting a lot of grief in the last few weeks over his pledge that with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in place, people would be able to keep their insurance if they like it. The media have been filled with stories about people across the country who are having their insurance policies terminated, ostensibly because they did not meet the requirements of the ACA. While this has led many to say that Obama was lying, there is much less here than meets the eye.

First, it is important to note that the ACA grand-fathered all the individual policies that were in place at the time the law was enacted. This means that the plans in effect at the time that President Obama was pushing the bill could still be offered even if they did not meet all the standards laid out in the ACA.

The plans being terminated because they don’t meet the minimal standards were all plans that insurers introduced after the passage of the ACA. Insurers introduced these plans knowing that they would not meet the standards that would come into effect in 2014. Insurers may not have informed their clients at the time they sold these plans that they would not be available after 2014 because they had designed a plan that did not comply with the ACA.

However if the insurers didn’t tell their clients that the new plans would only be available for a short period of time, the blame would seem to rest with the insurance companies, not the ACA. After all, President Obama did not promise people that he would keep insurers from developing new plans that will not comply with the provisions of the ACA.
read more here

Back to this issue and the fact that the computer programmers screwed up and should have been fired along with having to pay back what they got for sucking at their jobs, but again, reporters wanted to pretend it was all Obama's fault.

Never mind that Congress has had three years to make sure the money was being spent wisely and the contractors would deliver what they said they would but hey, got them a lot more attention to hold the hearings after the fact, much like they do most of the time.

Then we have the cluster you-know-what with the Benghazi report 60 Minutes screwed up but Senator Graham didn't seem to understand that it was a lie.

These are just part of a very long list of things the reporters play on. Would be nice if they would use some common sense and actually start getting the answers we really want to know.

Why were members of Congress so hell bent on getting rid of the one thing that tried to fix what was happening to family after family in this country suffering because of health insurance? Why didn't they spend that amount of time trying to find the best solution for what we needed and not what they could fire up some hotheads with? Did they ever really think of us?

Why didn't insurance companies do the right thing? They had three years to come up with policies that would work for the people who trusted them with their premiums every month. Did anyone ask about the policies that were canceled? Did they ask if those policies ended up belonging to policy holders who dared to file a claim for care? Anyone ask? Did anyone ask to see if the policy holders were looking for something else, shopping around and got canceled because of that?

Believe me, if you read Wounded Times with any regularity, you know I don't defend any politician. It would really be nice if most reporters deserved defending for telling the truth for a change and asking questions so we can know what the facts are instead of playing games on our emotions. In this case, health insurance coverage is a matter of life or death for too many of us. Would have been great if they took it seriously enough before all of this.