The headline was ominous.
?Survey: Employers Consider Ending Health Coverage,? said the?AP. The story appeared around the web, in various newspapers and websites.
Not many others covered the story, which was based on an employer survey by the consulting group Towers Watson. But I did find a similarly frightening headline at International Business Times: ?Employers Look Towards Ending Health Coverage, Survey.?
Boise Weekly offered its own bad news: ?Study: Companies Will Pay Fines Rather Than Participate in Health Insurance Exchanges.?
The stories were about what companies plan to do in 2014, when substantial provisions of the nation?s health care reform law kick into action. And if you read only the headlines, you?d be worried.
So what do companies plan to do? According to the perfectly fine story by the AP, ?Nearly one of every 10 midsized or big employers expects to stop offering health coverage to workers once federal insurance exchanges start in 2014.?
Or, to put it another way, more than 90 percent of these employers do not expect to stop offering health coverage. How does that rate the headline ?Employers Consider Ending Health Coverage?? The hed and the lede are locked in a bloody battle for the truth, and readers are the victims.
Here?s how Towers Watson headlined its press release on the survey: ?Employers Committed to Offering Health Care Benefits Today.?
Did any of the headline writers look at the release, or at the stories to which they were attaching the alarming headlines?
Towers Watson did go on to say that the employers it surveyed were ?concerned about viability of insurance exchanges? that will be created in 2014. But it did not say employers would ?consider? or ?look towards? ending coverage, or ?pay fines rather than participate.?
Maybe yesterday?s earthquake splintered the nation?s headline machine. Let?s hope it?s repaired quickly.
- Paul Raeburn
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