I flipped over to CNN the other night because I wondered how they were covering their own bad reporting about the Supreme Court decision, and instead I landed in Erin Burnett's show - always a bad moment. I couldn't stand her when she was on CNBC, but at least she had the late great Mark Haines there to pull her back from her corporate rants. On CNN, that's what they pay her to do, I guess.
Her message: "America just woke up with a tiger in the bathroom."
Viewer: Huh? What the hell is she on about there?
Other message: "We are all losers, because we have to hate what ACA does not do - lower the cost of health care."
Me: Change the channel fast!
Seriously?
It's insulting to our intelligence to hear a lecture on the "high cost of health insurance" on the day it became more affordable, especially from someone who started out working for Goldman Sachs, and who made their career out of tossing around million dollar figures on Squawk Box as if it were chump change. Did I mention her significant other who works for Citigroup? She's gone back to that evil bank manager voice that she used in her first piece with CNN about Occupy Wall Street, when she found some teenager who was hypnotized by her boobs and lectured him on the error of his ways. Poor kid.
In this piece she shakes her head in mock-sympathy and sounds as if she's been weeping over the ACA ruling all day. Then she delivers her condescending Debbie-Downer opinion that the only important thing is bringing down the cost of health care, and help for the poor just doesn't matter.
Well guess what, Erin? Now insurers have to give rebates when they make us overpay! And the really poor won't be "overpaying" or paying much at all, and that's what the plan is for.The rest of us can keep what we have, but we also get to keep our kids on the plan until age 26, which will save millions of dollars of out of pocket expenditures by families.
That we should be unhappy that more people are insured is one of the stupidest talking points, but the Republicans are lucky to have news people like Erin to get the message out there. Let's all feel sorry for the big insurance companies and their investors, right?
When CNN cleans house in a few weeks (if it even takes that long) she should be right at the top of the list. Buh-Bye, Debbie Downer!
Media Matters Story
CNN's Erin Burnett cherry-picked numbers to claim that the health care reform law was "a massive fail" because medical costs are expected to grow more in 2014 than they did in 2010.
But the massive fail here is on Burnett: health care costs in 2010 grew at historically low rates as the country emerged from a deep recession, making it an inappropriate point of comparison.
. . . Burnett took one of the lowest rates of health spending growth on record and compared it to the year that will bring the largest impact on growth, and declared that everybody loses.
CNN's viewers most certainly did.
Haters gonna hate
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