Generally Up To No Good
The New York Times
is alone today in leading with President Clinton's determination to punish
health insurers who deny coverage to sick people in violation of federal law.
USA
Today leads with the rain-produced break in the Florida fires for
residents and firefighters, the first since Memorial Day. The Washington Post leads with a Maryland politics story and
gives the Florida fires equal billing with a profile of Sen. Trent Lott. The
Los
Angeles Times goes with intensifying pressure on both the UAW and GM to
settle their increasingly disruptive strike.
At issue in the Times lead is the 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum law, which
guarantees people losing group health care coverage alternative access to
individual policies regardless of any preexisting medical condition, and
provides for uninterrupted coverage for those moving from one job to another.
The paper reports that government officials are concerned that health insurance
companies are circumventing the law by discouraging sales to certain
individuals, charging very high premiums or penalizing insurance agents who
sell policies to those with preexisting conditions. In response, says the
paper, Clinton today will issue an order requiring that all health plans
insuring federal employees not do these things.
The LAT sums up the trouble looming for both sides and the general
economy in the GM strike: the five-week stoppage is already the most expensive
ever experienced by a U.S. automaker and the longest since 1970. The company is
warning that as a result, its sales could plunge by 40 percent this month and
its market share from 31 to 25 percent.
The Wall Street Journal weighs in with the only other potential
drag on the U.S. boom: the Asian economic meltdown. The fifty-five economists
participating in the paper's latest semiannual forecasting survey named the
Asian crisis as the major threat facing the U.S. economy and hold that it will
hit here during the next six to nine months in the form of slower production
and reduced employment. But the economists agree that these changes will not be
drastic because our low interest rates and low inflation mean we can keep
financing big-ticket purchases cheaply. Of course, such stories would be much
more valuable to the reader if they included a summary of what the
Journal 's past semi-annual forecasting surveys had concluded.
USAT 's "Money" front brings news that an obscure company has gotten a
patent for software that often performs Y2K bug fixes in 80 percent less time
than previous tools, bringing it business from the likes of Citibank,
NationsBank and the Interior Department. However, the paper also reports the
fix doesn't work universally.
The death of Roy Rogers gets a surprising amount of coverage: sure, a
thumbnail picture/reefer at USAT , but also top-front-with-picture at the
LAT , below-the-fold-front at the WP , and a big front-page
picture/reefer at the NYT . The NYT editorial (!) puts Proust on
the plains with, "For many viewers, the picture of Roy Rogers, aglint in the
sun, racing across the harmless West upon Trigger, is a picture as invincible
to time as a childhood memory." Still, the obituaries make it clear that both
Rogers and his wife Dale Evans achieved something altogether missing from show
business today: wholesome fame based on actual wholesomeness.
USAT goes front-page with word that an internal Defense Department
investigation concluded that the Pentagon's former deputy Inspector General,
retired Maj. Gen. David Hale, had affairs with wives of four subordinates. The
paper reports that the case is being watched closely in Congress, where there
are concerns that officers get treated more leniently than enlisted men. There
are other hotter background issues that the paper could have also mentioned: In
light of last year's Kelly Flynn case, doesn't the Hale matter show male
service members get a different sexual deal than females? And, how, given his
Monica troubles, can President Clinton politically handle any eventual
disciplinary sanction against Hale?
Following in the footsteps of last week's debunking NYT piece, the
WP says U.S. government officials and academic experts now say a
Pakistani man who claimed insider knowledge of his country's willingness to
preemptively nuke India is a fraud. "He doesn't know," the Post quotes one
scientist who interviewed the man for an hour, "the most elementary facts about
what a nuclear reactor is." No further word yet from USAT , which broke
the preemptive strike story last week.
The WP officially cherishes its "Meyer Principles" about lascivious
content, which basically say that the Post should be written so that it
could be read by a family together at the breakfast table. But it's still
surprising to learn that actual Post reporters actually internalize
them. Witness today's E.J. Dionne column, in which he says that when went to
the Web to look up the evangelical concept of "rapture," he got religious sites
side-by-side with porn sites. "For the record," Dionne immediately adds, "I
never did look at the porn sites. I knew I'd want to tell this story someday
and figured someone would ask."
