Health at the Tribune: 1.Beck’s Bad Ploy
The Tribune’s lodestar whenever it ponders public policy is its faith in the gluttonous inefficiency of big government. It’s a sturdy faith that’s led the Tribune to question the health-care schemes of the Clinton administration every step of the way.
This is an old lament. It arises from the totalitarian situation in which we all get to tell the IRS each year what we owe and once in a while the IRS makes us prove it.
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We anxiously scoured our 1040s and Schedule As and Form 2106s trying to locate where the IRS demands any of these things. If the IRS actually requires documentation of how we’ve disposed of our BVDs over the years, all is lost.
She asks a legitimate question. Eliminating the Salvation Army deduction isn’t the answer.
The study had been conducted by the not-for-profit Metro Chicago Information Center in collaboration with the Chicago Department of Health. Last September MCIC offered the media similar, if preliminary, figures that neither of the downtown papers picked up. MCIC didn’t want its completed study to sail into the same oblivion.
The third luncheon, scheduled for March 17, Saint Patrick’s Day, was to deal with health-care policy. “Because the issue had heated up, I felt it was important that a number of groups we’d worked with over the last two years have an opportunity to meet the beat reporters who’d be covering the issue,” says Clark.
Warren told Clark that business reporter Nancy Ryan had expressed an interest in writing about health insurance. “I said, isn’t it interesting that a business-side reporter is assigned to this?” Clark tells us. “How come the story keeps getting cut as “How much is this going to cost?’ instead of “What are we paying for?’ Which was what we wanted to get to on the panel.”
