When Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouted "you lie" at President Obama during his speech to both houses of Congress it sparked a remarkable response, particularly from the news media.

Once again, NPR comes to the defense of the president, as long as the president is a Democrat (I challenge you to find news stories of NPR defending a Republican president). In the predictable selective concern over accuracy NPR's Scott Horsley investigates certain aspects of Representative Wilson's outburst in Examining Health Care And Illegal Immigrants Claim. Horsley tries to assure the listener President Obama was speaking the truth when he said illegal aliens would not be covered by the government run health care plan being proposed in the current reform legislation. This claim is just as true as the emergency funds Congress appropriated to help the victims of hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Do you remember the innumerable complaints about how a lack of oversight and enforcement led to rampant fraud of that aid money? It is the same situation all over again with the health care reform legislation and illegal immigrants. There is language in the House bill preventing illegal immigrants from benefiting from this government health care plan the president supports. But there is no enforcement or oversight making sure the plan is implemented the way the president told the nation it would be. As with the Katrina aid money, no enforcement of such protections means there is no protection. It is empty language if there is no oversight. We were pounded with this point over the fraudulent use of Katrina money, but now we are supposed to ignore the same problem with the health care bill?

Apparently Horsley didn't address the possibility that legislation crafting something for the Democrat agenda could be problematic or useless. John Hawkins interviewed Joe Wilson after the incident and published it in An Interview With Congressman Joe Wilson. Rep. Wilson said this about the issue:

So, as the President was going through the speech, when he got to the part about illegal aliens and he was saying they wouldn’t receive benefits, I knew better because I had been following the amendments of the Ways and Means Committee and also the Energy and Commerce Committee.

I serve on the other committee, Education and Labor, that has jurisdiction. I was looking at all of the amendments and I knew that the Democrats had defeated the enforcement amendments about illegal aliens and these would be the amendments that would provide for verification of citizenship. That’s the wording and I’ve actually read the 1,000 page bill. The references to the illegal aliens in the bill didn’t have any enforcement. It was simply fluff.

What Katrina showed us is that a lack of oversight on public money can hurt people, and just because language exists in a bill to accomplish something doesn't mean that language is worth diddly. Horsley was satisfied in mentioning only that the language forbidding illegal aliens from benefiting from the health care bill was actually there, and that the president was technically correct in what he said on the matter. The fact that such provision was pragmatically worthless simply isn't in this news report. You see, when the president is a Democrat we're supposed to admiringly take his word for it.

Horsley at least allows William Gheen to make a statement in the aired story in which the issue of a lack of enforcement is made. Gheen makes the point that we already have rules and laws supposedly preventing illegal immigrants from benefiting from government programs meant only for people who pay into the system that fail to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. But Horsley makes sure the listener is well informed by referencing a nameless government attempt a few years earlier to weed out illegals by requiring medicaid recipients to prove their citizenship. How are we to know "only a handful of illegal immigrants were discovered" or that "large numbers of citizens lost medicaid because they couldn't provide the necessary documents" ? It would be helpful of Mr. Horsley to provide his source, as it is rather troublesome to neglect this detail. Alas, Horsley makes no mention of the amendments that Democrats defeated which were designed to provide oversight on the issue of illegals benefiting from the government run health care program. If there is no enforcement in the legislation (as was the case with Katrina aid) what good is the language of the bill? But enough with actually thinking about the issue, as a loyal liberal Horsley makes sure to suggest the concerns about rewarding illegal immigrants with a government run health care system are just a political ploy designed to gin up opposition.

The president also says opponents of these particular convoluted health care bills before both houses of Congress want to maintain the status quo. Why did Horsley say nothing of this Obama lie? His report took the time to portray the illegal immigration issue as an empty political trick, surely there would be time enough to address another questionable claim in the president's speech. The vast majority of opponents of the so-called "reform" currently being debated actually do want substantial change in America's health care system. But that doesn't mean government control is the solution to the problem. I, for one, being opposed to the idea of government control of health care totally and completely support the idea of Health Savings Accounts. With HSAs the money follows individuals, rather than the government deciding where it goes. Jim Graham, Director of Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, mentions some good alternatives in The Best Health Care Plan You've Never Heard Of. Graham has this to say:

Washington is in the midst of yet another scandal -- but not the kind you'd read about in a gossip rag. Congressional dilettantes are willfully ignoring health-care reform ideas that would cut costs and provide high-quality care to all.

Sound nuts? It shouldn't. By refusing to even consider consumer-driven health care (CDHC), congressional leaders are proving that they're more interested in putting the government in charge of Americans' health care than in actually improving patient outcomes. Decades of evidence show that CDHC-style reforms can achieve the stated goal of would-be health reformers:
high-quality care at low cost.

All the reform plans under consideration in Congress fail to address the biggest problem with our health-care system: third parties, like insurance companies or the government, pay for just about everything. Consequently, Americans have no idea how much the medical services they consume cost.

And why exactly was Wilson's outburst a "shock to Congressional protocol" as Horsley says? Democrats felt free to heckle and even boo President Bush during his 2005 State of the Union address: Flashback: Democrats Boo Bush At 2005 State Of The Union. Is it because it was only one voice yelling above the rest, or the fact that the word "lie" was used? Or is it simply that this happened to a president who was a Democrat?

I will give NPR credit for actually questioning the president's financial numbers that the health care bill would not add "one dime to the deficit now or in the future. Period." as the president claimed. In the September 10 broadcast of Marketplace Tamara Keith asked some financial analysts about those numbers in Inspecting Obama's health care claims. Their verdict? Another technically true issue, if you're willing to wait 20 or 30 years. Of course, if it takes 30 years to even out, then the president's claims are not true for the "now" aspect, are they? If government bureaucrats can't get a handle on predictions 6 months from now why should we give them credit on economic forecasts of 3 decades in the future?