Media Coverage of the Health Care Debate Remains Awful

As Josh notes, the Democrats and the Republicans have irreconcilable differences here. There will never be a compromise, ever. Why can't the media acknowledge that simple reality?:

Pretending that both parties just have very different approaches to solving a commonly agreed upon problem is really just a lie. It’s not true. One side is looking for ways to increase the number of people who have real health insurance and thus reasonable access to health care and the other is trying to get the government out of the health care provision business with the inevitable result that the opposite will be the case.

If you’re not clear on this fundamentally point, the whole thing does get really confusing. How can it be that both sides flatly refuse to work together at all? As Bash puts it, “Why can’t these parties work together on something that is such a huge part of the economy, that is something that is so vital to everybody’s lives, all of their constituents’ lives, [it’s] mind boggling.”

If you had an old building and one group wanted to refurbish and preserve it and the other wanted to tear it down, it wouldn’t surprise you that the two groups couldn’t work together on a solution. It’s an either/or. You’re trying to do two fundamentally opposite things, diametrically opposed. There’s no basis for cooperation or compromise because the fundamental goal is different. This entire health care debate has essentially been the same. Only the coverage has rarely captured that. That’s a big failure. It also explains why people get confused and even fed up.