Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Hollywood and AARP Combine for Bad Acting 

By Merrill Matthews, Jr.

Filed As:  Health Care

Uh-oh. That bastion of bad policy proposals, Hollywood, has decided to get into the health care reform debate. According to USA Today, a bunch of Hollywood-types, including Steven Spielberg-partner Jeffrey Katzenberg, are hooking up with AARP -- which has its own bad actors when it comes to health care reform -- "to bring attention to the need to provide affordable health care."

You already know what the message will be. For Hollywood, almost all of our societal ills are a result of greedy corporate CEOs, who will do anything to make -- or save -- a buck. No matter who or how many it hurts.

And so we'll be inundated by subtle -- and some not so subtle -- messages that employers should provide expensive, benefit-rich policies. This from the same industry that routinely uses contract labor and increasingly shoots films in foreign lands in order to avoid paying union wages.

As for AARP, don't expect any in the media to ask whether -- since AARP makes hundreds of millions of dollars from selling health insurance to its members -- it just might be pushing this effort in order to make more money.

Or as a way to push its own policy initiatives. AARP just announced it will spend millions of dollars to fight a proposal to raise Medicare's premiums in order to avoid cutting doctors' reimbursements by 10.6%.

The point is that AARP has an agenda. And as far as I can tell, its only real policy recommendation is to give just about everyone, and especially seniors, all the health care they need for little or nothing. Which happens to be filmmaker Michael Moore's only recommendation, and so will likely be Hollywood's only recommendation.

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