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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a good approach to health care, and I don't want to be snarky guy, but... Health Quality Partners is about to lose their funding and they get an 8-page glowing article on washingtonpost.com about how great their program is and why it should be continued. It looks like some PR agency is really earning their money.

See, of course, Paul Graham's article on PR agencies: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Going back to the subject of the article, I wonder how much this visit program actually costs, and whether it could be direct-marketed to wealthy people with elderly parents. "For $10,000(e.g.) a year, we can reduce your parents' hospitalizations by 33% and help them live independently." Sort of like concierge medicine.

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> Going back to the subject of the article, I wonder how much this visit program actually costs, and whether it could be direct-marketed to wealthy people with elderly parents. "For $10,000(e.g.) a year, we can reduce your parents' hospitalizations by 33% and help them live independently." Sort of like concierge medicine.

Better yet, maybe health insurance companies could offer lower rates to chronic patients who enroll in a visit-program. They are the organizations with the most financial incentive to implement these programs.

They absolutely would (and I still don't see why they don't the cost/benefit ratio of paying for that should make sense) but in this case they are talking about the people who have no insurance or whoes bills are paid by the federal tax payers.

And while there are a fair amount of positive things to say about the federal government, prudent financial planning isn't exactly one of them.

Just for clarity, it's an Ezra Klein blog entry, not an article. Obviously Klein is no less susceptible to PR, but this isn't being presented as an unbiased news article. He's an opinion journalist.

Just the same, though: considering how many people are unaware how and why famous bloggers focus on the topics they do, it would be quite an eye-opener for them to learn what led Klein to writing about this topic, and now. In that sense, I consider it somewhat fraudulent (unless he really honestly just discovered all this on his own, which I doubt is within his abilities).

Harsh.

I had a little back-and-forth with Violet Blue a few months ago. She accused some blogger of being egocentric in leading with personal pronouns. I defended said blogger, pointing out I do the same thing all the time, so as to give clues as to my thought process, the genesis of the post, and so on. She shot back a challenge that I should perhaps exhibit OTHER bloggers who do the same thing.

I found it hard to meet that challenge.

I'm not sure I see the relevance.

The relevance is that there is a request for bloggers to reveal every little detail of the process of how they decided on what to write when, and I'm saying that's a very unusual practice.

The similarity isn't applicable. While I see now that my original comment was unclear and overbroad, let me emphasize that I'm not suggesting bloggers do a full "coredump" of their thought processes.

I'm just saying that if a PR agent (or other heavily incentivized group) is directing your attention to a topic (and [in]forming your analysis), while the typical reader would not assume that's how you do it, then you should say so. Same as you would disclose any other conflict of interest.

"I typical form my speech with this pronoun pattern" is not affected by that practice. (edit: and those who criticized you were pretty loopy in doing so, fwiw)

Your "if" is contrafactual -- more precisely the "while" clause is -- for the reasons I illustrated with the story of the pronoun pattern. At least it should be.

Klein surely gets dozens of PR pitches per day, if not hundreds. Of course he's going to be influenced by a few of them. The people who assume otherwise ... well, they may well be too clueless to be his target audience.

And, returning to my point, it's not common to outline the genesis of any particular opinion column or blog post. I don't really do it, yet I'm closer to doing it than most.

Seriously? You're claiming that most people are aware that writers are choosing their topics (and ideas) because they were fed them that by PR agents?

I'm claiming that most people are aware that PR agents work hard to try to influence us, and that their failure rate isn't 100.00%

Here's a story from atul gawande that has a similar point. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_...

As far as i can tell , atul is a pretty serious health care journalist so him posting this story tells me it's probably not PR.

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