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All three newscasts filed a healthcare feature after covering the President's AMA speech. CBS was inspired by the health policy wonks at the White House to send Don Teague to follow-up on an article in The New Yorker about McAllen, the city on the Tex-Mex border. McAllen's healthcare costs are twice the national average. "Doctors say the criticism is grossly unfair," Teague found, as they denied running up costs by ordering unnecessary treatments. The Rio Grande city is "the poorest metro area in the nation with the lowest number of doctors per capita. It also has one of the unhealthiest populations with high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease."
ABC's John McKenzie told us about red yeast rice, the Chinese food coloring that gives Peking duck its "signature red glow." Ground up and taken as a nutritional supplement the red rice can reduce harmful levels of cholesterol as efficiently as a prescription statin such as Zocor or Lipitor, without the risk of muscular side effects.
Ron Mott's offered an emotionally manipulative effort for NBC's In Depth. He started with the legitimate story of the investigation by the Veterans Administration into flawed disinfection of diagnostic equipment at its hospitals. The VA found facilities in Miami, Georgia and Tennessee that were using unsanitary procedures. It tested 8,000 veterans and found 53 positive screens for hepatitis and HIV, patients who might have been infected by tainted tests. So what was wrong with Mott's report? He illustrated it with the case of Vietnam veteran Michael Priest, who tested HIV+ after a colonoscopy. The problem was that a second blood test showed no infection; it had been a false positive. No harm. No foul. No story.
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