I'm not sure how I feel about Trudy Lieberman's argument that health care reporting is insufficiently thick with anecdotes. On the one hand, the "how will this affect real people" question is the central one. On the other, which real people? The unemployed inner city mother making $5,000, or the unemployed inner city man making $5,000? The child who needs a bridge or the one who needs a root canal? The man in the emergency room in Tucson or the man in an emergency room in rural Arizona? The campaigns will happily furnish you with examples of individuals who will be helped, and their rivals will merrily fill your inbox with stories of those who will be left behind. It's amazing how many sides of a story can be proven by anecdote. To evaluate these policy ideas, you really do need the talk "on the bare, dry facts of candidates’ proposals." Indeed, it strikes me as misguided to draw a sharp line between the questions of how does the policy work and who are the real people it works for. Those "bare, dry" facts that Lieberman derides refer to real people. When policy analysts say that Obama's plan will leave 15 million without insurance, that's 15 million real people. When reporters notice that John McCain's plan will do nothing for the millions of Americans with preexisting conditions, those are millions of real people. Illustrating those facts through personal stories may be good for the narrative, but it's the bare, dry facts that are really telling you about the world that these "real people" will live in.
