If you are going to read 3 things today….

…you should read the columns by Jamison Foser of Media Matters, Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post and Paul Krugman of the New York Times. Read together they provide a good sense of how the current political debate over health care is not actually about reforming health care policy.

Jamo’s piece focuses on how the media’s fixation with covering the politics of health care reform actually provides less clarity on what the debate is actually about. With polls providing conflicting opinions about what people want and stand alone results without comparison, while visually compelling but unrepresentative protests dominate the airwaves reporting on health care reform conforms to a pre-existing narrative of conflict, but never explains what the conflict is about. Jamo writes:

If news organizations want to produce health care reporting that actually has some value, some utility to their readers and viewers, they'll forget about the polls and the protests and the politics and focus on making the actual facts about health care, and efforts to change the system, as clear as they can.

I know what many journalists will say: This is how things are. Political intrigue, controversy, polling, strategy, demonstrations -- these are the things the media cover. That's how it works.

No. That's how it doesn't work. That's how we have a public that is so badly confused about health care reform that polling on the topic is basically a useless bundle of contradictory results. That's how we have a situation in which more than half of the Republican Party doesn't know Barack Obama was born in the United States. And how is this approach working for the media? Public trust in and respect for journalists is not exactly strong -- and, as I'm sure most reporters have noticed, news organizations across the country are shedding employees in a desperate struggle to stay afloat.

Steve Pearlstein, an economics columnist for the Washington Post who writes interestingly, insightfully and rarely polemically on economic and business issues writes a full-throated condemnation of falsehoods being propagated by the anti-health care reform GOP. Pearlstein writes that the GOP has “given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.” Pearlstein’s point is that the obvious distortion of the health care debate exists primarily to NOT solve the problem. He concludes:

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

Paul Krugman focuses on the disruptions that opponents of health care reform have brought to town hall meeting on the topic, such as the violence that erupted at a Tampa town hall and the arrests that occurred in St. Louis. Krugman focuses on an incident at town hall meeting with Rep. Gene Green of Texas when Green gets almost all hands raised when he asks attendees whether they oppose “socialized medicine” and almost half raise their hands when he asks if they are on Medicare. Krugman raises an important and potentially incendiary point (emphasis added).

Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

By reading these three pieces together, it is possible to see how the health care debate has become badly distorted. A press corps focused on politics and public opinion polls doesn’t bother to report on what the actual policy issues surrounding health care reform are. Cynical political opponents feel unconstrained to make false and misleading claims about health care reform knowing that the press will report the conflict but not focus on the accuracy of the claims. Folks predisposed to dislike President Obama and his supporters are then organized to protest something nominally about policy but really about dislike for who is proposing the policy.

These three columns provide a roadmap to explain how we got from debating level of subsidies for the uninsured and public option plan to arrests and death threats at town hall meetings.