America's Top Issue and the Illinois Press Goes Missing

The Illinois General Assembly session, now in overtime, might best be characterized with a nod to Alice’s white rabbit from Wonderland, “curiouser and curiouser.” Take your pick of ironies and oddities. But one of the top curiosities of the session is the way that the press has completely ignored the governor’s historic health care plan, Illinois Covered. In its obsession with personalities, the press has utterly failed to cover one of the top public policy issues in America.

Illinois Covered is a carefully crafted plan with broad support among national experts. It is derived directly from the research and consensus built by a wide array of health care stakeholders who served on the Illinois Adequate Health Care Task Force. It would offer affordable coverage to the one and a half million Illinoisans who are uninsured. It would offer all of us who already have insurance a desperately needed fallback—a guaranteed-issue, affordable policy with decent coverage in the event our employers drop coverage or we lose coverage some other way. This possibility, a nightmare in every household, would be laid to rest.

The plan would bring long-awaited stability and control to the health insurance market. All of us who already have insurance, and all of our employers who support the plan, would find new predictability and moderation in the insurance market. The plan would be a tremendous gain for everyone in the state, not just the uninsured. 

All in all, this is a major story, but the press did not cover it. There has been no analysis of the plan itself and no coverage of the issue in its many aspects. No series of articles on people who need insurance, employers who pay too much for it, other employers who gain a competitive advantage by shifting responsibility onto the taxpayers, middle-class people who are suddenly uninsured, health care bankruptcies. Everyone has a relative or neighbor who has fought off a disease but lost insurance when away from work and now cannot find a new job or maintain needed medications or treatment because of the insurance problem. But there have been no such stories in the press. No reporter has figured out the direct connection between Illinois Covered’s insuring the uninsured and the resulting solution to the Cook County health system budget crisis or questioned why Cook County government has not shown up to support Illinois Covered but instead continues to cut needed services. There have been no polling and no deep analysis of what voters want and are willing to pay for. 

The health care system in this country is a bona fide crisis. It consistently polls as a top concern of huge majorities of voters. Around the kitchen tables of virtually every home at any income level it causes consternation or despair. People in large numbers do not yet appreciate how government can help, and they have been indoctrinated with cynicism on the problem due to past fights over it. Thus they do not yet appreciate that a respectable and credible proposal such as Illinois Covered is a real and substantial answer to their worries. If they did, most would support paying for it.

Straight news coverage of the problems of the health care system, of the details of how Illinois Covered would deal with those problems, and of the opposing arguments was not only demanded by the importance and urgency of the problem but also essential to the best possible outcome. 

The Illinois press has failed to cover the issue as news, and as a result it has not prompted a vigorous debate of Illinois Covered itself or of the health crisis in general. Politics is an interesting spectator sport, and there are lots of personalized axes to grind in Springfield. This perhaps explains the coverage we have seen. But whatever the reason, the press has dropped the ball on Illinois Covered and on the health coverage crisis.