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All three White House correspondents covered Barack Obama's address to the American Medical Association. ABC's Jake Tapper and NBC's Chuck Todd both used the President's argument that healthcare poses a national fiscal emergency: "If we do not fix our healthcare system, America may go the way of General Motors--paying more, getting less, going broke." ABC's Tapper cited an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office that providing coverage to only 16m of the nation's uninsured would cost $1tr over a decade. ABC's substitute anchor George Stephanopoulos did the math and calculated that each would cost $62,500--which sounds a lot as a lump sum. If he had made it $521 per person per month it would have sounded less outrageous. CBS' Chip Reid, too, quoted the $1tr-per-decade estimate: "Critics say that is about half the real cost."
NBC's Todd acknowledged that healthcare reform is a "complicated issue," ticking off such problems as the lack of preventive care, an excess of unnecessary procedures, mangled performance incentives and a lack of electronic recordkeeping. Todd and his colleagues all agreed that the prospect of offering non-profit federal coverage to compete with for-profit insurance was a key controversy. CBS' Reid suggested that it could be "a step towards socialized medicine" or, as NBC's Todd put it, "not a first step toward a full-fledged government takeover of healthcare." ABC's Tapper wondered whether the public plan might "drive private insurers out of business."
ABC's Stephanopoulos inquired of Timothy Johnson (at the tail of the Tapper videostream), his network's in-house physician, what doctors have against socialized medicine. "The biggest concern, quite frankly, is economic. Medicare, which is a public option plan for the elderly, pays about 20% less to the doctors than private plans do."
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