File Under: Journalism working hard to earn our mistrust

I wrote a Facebook post about our biggest covid challenge right now: full capacity hospitals, filled with unvaccinated patients, having to turn away anyone needing emergency care. I used this as a basis for vaccine mandates being the least bad option. Someone responded that we should instead look for ways to increase the supply of hospital staff to meet this increased demand.

So imagine my surprise when I see this story on the homepage of the New York Times titled, “We Know the Real Cause of the Crisis in Our Hospitals. It’s Greed.”

I watch the video and it’s mostly interviews with nurses talking about the stress of being understaffed. Part of the segment explains how some states have tried to pass laws that require minimum nurse-to-patient ratios and then it shows a commercial from a lobbyist group that helped kill the bill. 

But as I zoomed out, I realized that I’m basically watching a commercial from a lobbyist group representing a nursing union. More depressing, nothing in the piece tried to fact check whether the “real cause” is, in fact, hospitals making money hand over fist by not hiring more nurses.

Knowing I have a full time job and a family, and lacking the highly-selective aptitude of a New York Times journalist, I decided to wing it and see what my very limited sleuth skills could uncover. 

After spending 15 seconds googling “hospital profit margins” I find this Moody’s report.

“nonprofit hospitals' profits declined significantly amid the pandemic. Specifically, nonprofit hospitals had a median operating margin of 0.5% in fiscal year (FY) 2020, down from 2.4% in FY 2019, and an operating flow margin of 6.7%, down from 8.4% in FY 2019…

“Moody's also found that nonprofit hospitals' expenses grew in FY2020 at a 4.7% rate—lower than the rate of expense growth in 2019 (5.9%), but still outpacing revenue growth, which was 3%.” 

From something called Becker’s Hospital Review:

“The steep decline resulted from a "tumultuous 2020," according to Kaufman Hall. For hospitals, financial stress in 2020 came from growing COVID-19 hospitalization rates, escalating expenses, declining elective care volumes and reduced outpatient revenue.”

Oh, so the reason hospitals aren’t spending more to hire more nurses isn’t because their CEOs like swimming in pools of all that fat profit, isn’t because they have no profit because of COVID-19.

Look, I don’t think this is an example of the MAINSTREAM MEDIA carrying water for the Democrats. But I think it’s lazy journalism and an example of why people are losing trust in institutions.

There are so many sources of disinformation out there. But there are also so many people choosing to listen to these sources over more credible ones and I feel like that is the part we don't talk about enough.

— Darkwater O'Scanlonski (@bayesianfox) January 16, 2022

You can blame people for choosing Joe Rogan interviewing a disgraced doctor peddling conspiracy theories rather than reading the New York Times. But at a certain point, legacy media needs to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves what they've done to drive so many people away.