Spinning health reform to death

Much of the mainstream U.S. news media is almost giddy over the setbacks in President Barack Obama's health-care reform. On Thursday, CNBC anchors even were pushing the dubious theme that Obama's health-care troubles explained the stock market rally. Yet, while the big-time pundits are obsessed with the prospect of Obama's political "Waterloo"–as Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina put it–media critic Norman Solomon notes in this guest essay that the press is giving short shrift to the actual content of the health legislation or the concept of health care as a human right: "I want to cover everybody," President Obama said at his news conference Wednesday night. "Now, the truth is that unless you have a - what's called a single-payer system, in which everybody's automatically covered, then you're probably not going to reach every single individual ..." The same conventional wisdom keeping single payer off Washington's table has been spinning for various "reform" plans with such accelerated RPMs that at this point the nation's "health care debate" is suffering from a severe case of vertigo.