NEW YORK, NY April 10 (DPI) – The New York Times led its front page today with some major revelations that two Florida doctors – among the highest Medicare billers in the nation — were big contributors to top Democrats and their political action committees.
But curiously, The Times refrained from adding a comment board to the story, a move that would have likely unleashed another torrent of reader criticism against the political establishment – and specifically against Democrats, the biggest defenders of the status quo of Medicare and Medicaid.
Still, the report demonstrated that The Times, which has turned openly leftward in recent years, was still willing to print news reinforcing a growing public view that both parties are complicit in Washington’s current culture of ineffective management and political corruption.
The Times’s commitment to the story was not exactly ongoing: By mid-afternoon Wednesday, Times editors had already buried the story on its web site, with no mention or link on its index page. The report was largely the result of the release of new data from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The Times also published an interactive page that allows users to see how much more than 800,000 health care providers received payments in 2012 from Medicare Part B, which covers doctor visits, tests and other treatments. The graphic served to underscore that the majority of doctors who perform those services are subjected to extremely low rates of reimbursement:
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/09/health/medicare-doctor-database.html