The New York Times has finally discovered a federal subsidy it opposes: the one for farmers. On its front page today, the Times runs an article under the headline, "Far From Dead, Subsidies Fuel Big Farms." The article is full of skeptical quotes from economists and politicians critical of the taxpayer support for big agriculture. Senator Lugar calls it, honestly, "a transfer payment from taxpayers to the agricultural sector." An economist at the Department of Agriculture calls the subsidies "an income supplement from the government" and says, "The cost of this program is astonishing. Any person engaged in small business in America would be amazed looking at this. Their jaws would drop at the money farmers receive."
All the more silly, then, is an article elsewhere on the front page of today's Times, this one under the headline, "A Broad Alliance Tries to Head Off Cuts in Medicare; Loss of Billions is Seen; Union Leaders and Politicians Cite an Expanding Threat to Teaching Hospitals." A reader of that article looking for references to "a transfer payment from taxpayers to the medical sector" or "an income supplement from the government" would be searching in vain. Instead, this Times article swallows the line of the teaching-hospital lobbyists hook, line and sinker, devoting paragraph after paragraph to hospital administrators and politicians bemoaning the woes that will supposedly befall New York's academic hospitals if the hardworking taxpayers in the rest of the country stop subsidizing them (though the word "subsidizing," of course, is never used).
In the article about hospitals, the case against the subsidy is reduced to one paragraph in a 23-paragraph story. That paragraph says, "New York's hospitals are not completely without blame, however. Managed care companies and government officials have long complained that the state's hospital industry is still very inefficient and that hospital executives are too quick to rely on the federal and state governments to bail them out." That phrase "have long complained" is a signal to readers that the Times isn't going to bother actually to go interview any of those managed care companies or government officials and quote them in this story. The heads of the academic hospitals and the politicians who want to preserve the subsidies all get interviewed and quoted freshly in the Times article, however, even though they, too, have long complained that they aren't getting enough money from the government.
To get a sense of the tenor of the complaints made by the heads of the teaching hospitals, check out the comments by "Peter A. Kelly, the chief executive of the company that runs Beth Israel Medical Center, St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary in Manhattan, as well as Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn." The Times paraphrased Mr. Kelly as warning that "Medicare funding losses could mean staff reductions across the board, from primary care programs to inpatient critical care units." "We've all gone as far as we can in terms of reductions that will not impact critical care," Mr. Kelly tells the Times.
But while the Times and the hospital lobbyists make the case that the patients are going to be hit by these cuts, it never mentions the fact that the subsidies are also paying the salaries of doctors and hospital executives who drive to work in Mercedeses and BMWs paid for by, in essence, the Medicare taxes of working stiffs. (Nor that those same subsidies are paying for lots of feel-good ads the hospitals place in the New York Times.) The 1998 tax returns of Mr. Kelly's "non-profit" health care company, for instance, show that the company's CEO earned $1.4 million that year, and that Mr. Kelly, then a lower-level executive, earned $985,000. Now, when you are getting wheeled into the operating room, you want the best doctor that money can buy. And Smartertimes.com acknowledges that health care is in some ways different from farming. Still, the Times health care policy coverage would be improved if a little of the skepticism applied to farm subsidies were applied as well to the government subsidies to the health-care industry.
Can't Spell: That same front-page article on cuts to teaching hospitals manages to misspell the name of the junior senator from Texas. The New York Times refers to her as "Kay Bailey Hutchinson" and again as "Ms. Hutchinson"; in fact, her last name is "Hutchison." Smartertimes.com caught the Times in this same exact spelling error on February 17, 2001, and the Times corrected it on February 19, 2001. Now the paper has repeated the same error.
Lost in California: A front-page article in today's New York Times is datelined Irvine, Calif. The article refers to "Ventura, just north of here." Ventura isn't "just" north of Irvine. It's 109 miles away -- a two-hour drive, depending on traffic.