Like Jamison Foser earlier this week, I was struck by this passage from David Carr's recent New York Times column. The topic was how the WSJ news team is skewing its Obama news coverage to the right [emphasis added]:

Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits.

But the Journal is hardly alone in this regard. It's a disturbing fact that when covering the health care debate, Beltway reporters and pundits are very interested in writing and talking about the costs involved, how it might impact the federal deficit, and the general downsides involved in instituting a fundamental change in American health care. In other words, for many journalists the issue of health care is a financial and numbers-crunching one.

But it's federal number-crunching only. Meaning, most of the media emphasis is on the important dollars involved. The numbers that are not being crunched are the numbers that millions of American families without health insurance crunch as they try to hold off bankruptcy when medical emergencies strike.

The very real and personal impact of America's ongoing health care crisis has been of little interest to members of the Beltway press corps (most of whom enjoy full health care benefits), who prefer to spend their time pouring over CBO analysis and repeating Republican talking points about how health care reform would be a budget buster. Why health care reform has been sought in this country for going on five decades seems to be of very little interest to elite Beltway journalists.

And that's why this recent report from the Newark Star-Ledger sort of jumped off the pages; because the press has shown so little interest in telling stories like this:

The pain in Dan Abrams' leg throbbed so much he could barely stand.

Still, the 60-year-old Somerville resident, who friends say had just canceled his health insurance because of the tough economy, debated from a hospital emergency room whether he should stay and run up thousands of dollars in debt, or take antibiotics from home and hope they arrested the mysterious infection in his leg.

Fearing he could lose his home and flooring business, Abrams chose to leave Somerset Medical Center after a hospital physician said staying would “run him a lot of money,” said Connie Dodd, a close friend who drove him to the hospital and heard the conversation. “I begged him to stay. But Dan's a proud man. Talk of all the bills got him scared.”

When Connie and her partner, Cindy Weiss, brought Abrams dinner the next night, July 29, they found his lifeless body in bed. Weiss performed CPR but it was too late. “It was a nightmare,” Dodd said.