Back when I was an editor, I used to get all these phone calls from the state PR person wondering (demanding, really) why I wasn’t running the press releases about welfare fraud. I told her that I knew more money was stolen from within the department, and if they sent me press releases about that, I’d be happy to run them. My point was that news has context, and it’s important to have some, as Dean Baker points out here:
The Washington Post decided to highlight the fact that a review of Illinois Medicaid documents going back to 1970 found that less than 0.01 percent of the programs spending were payments made for people who are already dead. This information was the basis of a major page 3 AP story in the Sunday paper.
The article actually never informed readers how large the improper payments were as a share of the program’s budget. Instead it told readers that $12 million in such payments had been made, $7 million of which were already recovered. If the article had been competently reported, the real story would be that Illinois’ Medicaid program seems to be fairly well run in this respect. (It did include a statement from the director of the state program saying that these overpayments involved less than one tenth of one percent of their caseloads and an ever smaller share of the budget. It would have been more useful if the article directly provided this information to readers rather than leaving this as an assertion by an interested party.)
