Source Reveals What CNN’s Drew Griffin Left Out of Report About Wisconsin Clinics

On Thursday, CNN Newsroom with Wolf Blitzer aired a report by CNN Investigative Unit reporter Drew Griffin that highlighted the difficulties that some low-income patients at Wisconsin community health clinics are having signing up for Obamacare. Conspicuously absent from that report, however, was any mention of Wisconsin’s refusal to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and decision to throw tens of thousands out of the current program.

The peg to Griffin’s report is that the clinic’s staff have yet to sign anyone up for health insurance through the Obamacare exchange, mainly as a result of the well-documented difficulties with the healthcare.gov website. In his report, Griffin said, of Progressive Community Health Centers, that “8,000 patients a year come here for almost free health care. And they’ve been doing that for years. That’s why workers here were so excited about the Affordable Care Act. Finally, low-income patients would be able to get health insurance, many for the first time.”

What Griffin left out was that many of those low income patients would be losing their health insurance, as of January 1, because of Governor Scott Walker‘s (R-WI) changes to the state’s Badgercare (Wisconsin’s version of Medicaid) eligibility rules, and that many more would have been eligible for Medicaid if Walker had accepted Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

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At first blush, this appears to be a simple case of a reporter simply not asking the right questions, but Griffin apparently did ask the right questions, and chose not to report the answers. Progressive Community Health Centers CEO Jenni Sevenich, one of the sources cited in the report, says she did discuss the Medicaid issues with Griffin, but they were not included in the report. “We did discuss that with them,” Sevenich said, “but they didn’t put that part in the segment.”

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Karl said:

Kind of quashes the right's liberal media meme.

But it does illustrate a comment I heard the other day, emanating for Europe IIRC, that the U.S. is centrist. The Dems are somewhat left centrist and the Repubs are somewhat right centrist but they agree on central conservative tenets such as dis-empowering workers, reduction in social programs, budgetary austerity, strong military, curbing of civil rights (NSA/TSA/etc), etc. Obama himself is clearly very centrist (militaristic (drone strikes), authoritarian (spying), austere (welfare reform, sequestration, etc)). So you in effect have one consolidated political party, with only the extremes on the fringes (Tea Party on the right and I suppose environmentalists on the left).

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MrVicchio said:

Oh for YAWN. The reason they didn't mention the whole Medicare/Medicaid angle is simply that the reality is that's the only option for many of these people, going on the dole. That's not pushing the narrative of "Affordable healthcare" it's pushing more welfare. That's not the in-message man.

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Fisher said:

If the piece was about the difficulty signing up, then I fail to see how leaving out the parts not about the sign ups is a smoking gun to anything. Stories get edited.

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Karl said:

I believe the point was that if the WI governor had not refused the Medicaid assistance, out of ideological spite (or worse), then those people would have qualified for Medicaid and would not need to try to sign up for Obamacare.

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