Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles

The next best thing is terrible

I say much that is critical of Obama in this column, as I have in other recent columns. I should make clear, however, that I consider him light-years better than George W. Bush or indeed than any Republican candidate on the horizon. Similarly, on the whole, I find a Democratic majority in Congress infinitely preferable to a Republican one. And so are Democratic majorities in state legislatures, the importance of which cannot be overestimated. Next year, these legislatures will be doing the redistricting of congressional districts based on the 2010 census. It's fair to predict that the more seats are made safely Republican, the more Tea Party members we will have in Congress. The Tea Partiers are not all bad people, but they do seem totally disconnected from the real world of responsible problem solving.

To be sure, Illinois would understand

The headline reads "Lincoln Voters Alive, Prosecutor Says." No, it is not a story about surviving members from the 1860 or 1864 electorate. It is a recent article from the Charleston Gazette, describing voters of Lincoln County, West Virginia, whose eligibility had been questioned. My home state is unique. Only in West Virginia could it be news that voters are alive.

The Beginning is not the End

Perhaps my most ancient complaint against the Washington press corps is that it has regarded the passage of a bill as the end of the story, with a resulting failure to follow the bill's implementation and to determine how it is being carried out. At long last there seems to be at least some sign of an awakening--first on the health bill, and most recently on Wall Street reform legislation. Stories about the passage of the new laws have made the point that the reforms cannot be fairly judged until the Fed, the SEC, and other agencies actually implement them.

Another heartening sign is the follow-up stories on the health bill that have already appeared. For example, the New York Times has reported that where states have failed to establish coverage for the hard to insure, the federal government is stepping in to do the job. And the Washington Post has reported that health insurers are already hard at work pressing regulators to interpret the new law in their favor. You will recall that the health care bill requires that at least 80 percent of premium dollars go to medical and not administrative expenses. Among the items that insurers are contending should be treated as medical expenses, writes the Post's David S. Hilzenrath, are the cost of "precertification" departments that "determine whether the insurer should cover treatment that doctors have proposed" and the conducting of "reviews when patients appeal an insurance company's decision to deny coverage."

These expenses are so obviously administrative that Hilzenrath's story should act as an early warning to the media to keep an eye peeled on attempts by the insurance industry to have its way with the health bill. We have already a similar warning about Wall Street reform from Eric Dash and Nelson D. Schwartz of the New York Times, whose piece is subtitled "Its Fight Ended, Wall St. Is Already Working Around New Regulations" and a Times lead article by Binyamin Appelbaum, "On Finance Bill, Lobbying Shifts to Regulations."

News you can lose

Unfortunately, even as the case for better coverage of federal agencies becomes more obvious--consider not only the health care and Wall Street examples, but the recent tragedies caused in considerable part by ineptitude at the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Minerals Management Service--Jodi Enda of American Journalism Review reports that coverage of federal agencies is at "an alarming low," because of cutbacks in print journalism and because of the...