We review the news stories that we post on Elder-Gateway every morning. We have seen a troubling trend. We call it “flooding the news” because of numerous articles that are really the same news, varied by place and by time.
The most notable example is about the government checks for $250 to some senior citizens on Medicare who are in the donut hole in paying for prescription drugs.
First came numerous stories that seniors would be getting checks, then that the checks were being readied, then that the checks were being mailed, then that they were mailed, and then that seniors were receiving them.
The next thing was a slew of stories from what seemed every state attorney general warning that the $250 rebates were so great that they needed to warn seniors about possible scams concerning them. Attorney General this and Attorney General that, all warning the same thing, only the state name was changed.
Each of these stories is news, but we do not need fifty of them. We did our best to post one of each and stop the rest.
In the course of this, around June 11th, stories appeared that the President and his party were promoting these rebate checks. Around the same time, the President began another sell of his health care reform law, of which these rebates are a part.
Again, around the same time but earlier, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, sent millions of seniors a brochure “Medicare and the new health care law — What it means for you” that was widely criticized as being more spin promoting health care reform than legitimate information.
It was easy to conclude that all of this was part of a political plan to promote the benefits of the new health care reform law that so many seniors do not support and want to see repealed.
We cannot really know why there were so many articles streaming into public view promoting the $250 rebate checks for a very few, but the timing was curiously tied to a political promotion and persuasion effort at the same time, and we concluded this was calculated and not coincidence.
It looked to us as if these stories were deliberately planted all around the country in order to promote a benefit of the new health care reform law and put it in a more favorable light.
We object when politicians manipulate the news for political ends, no matter how good the ends might be. We urge all seniors to keep abreast of the news that effects their lives and to exercise judgment in taking these stories in.
