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The New York Times on John McCain's health care rhetoric:
Senator John McCain has been repeatedly suggesting that his Democratic rivals are proposing a single-payer, or even a nationalized health care system along the lines of those in countries like Canada and Britain.The suggestion is incorrect. While both Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York are calling for universal health care and an expanded role for government, they stop well short of calling for a single-payer plan. Mr. McCain has made the assertion several times in recent days, even as he and the Republicans have made repeated calls for accuracy on the campaign trail. They have been complaining indignantly that the Democrats were grossly distorting his position by suggesting that he favors a “100-year war” in Iraq, when he has simply said that he would be fine with stationing troops there for 100 years as long as there were no more American casualties.Yet on repeated occasions, Mr. McCain, of Arizona, has inaccurately described the Democrats’ health care proposals, using language that evokes the specter of socialized medicine.Hear, hear! Indeed, Obama and Clinton are simply offering to put Americans into a national version of the health care John McCain has enjoyed as a member of Congress. If that care really were so bad, one might wonder why McCain isn't sicker, or why he never left and purchased private care with some of his heiress-wife's millions.As for the article, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many others have a tendency to run good pieces like this in special fact-checking columns. This one, for instance, is called "check point." The question, however, is whether the judgments rendered in these pieces are then integrated into the paper's daily coverage of the campaign. Having one fact-check column is meaningless. But creating a body of official policy judgments that are then used to create a factual superstructure around which future campaign articles are built -- well, then you'd really have something.
