Sinclair Spokesman's Dishonest Argument about Healthcare

Mark Hyman’s recent commentary on healthcare is especially grotesque in its use of invalid arguments, misleading phrasing, doctored evidence, and flat-out falsehoods.

The argument being made is essentially that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”) is, at best, unhelpful and, at worst, deadly.

Hyman begins by saying “we have the greatest healthcare in the world”-- an example of the “glittering generality” fallacy—using nice-sounding words that don’t mean anything specific.

The truth? The United States has the best healthcare in the world by exactly one metric: the cost we spend per person.

The World Health Organization, using a range of metrics measuring actual health outcomes for a nation’s citizens, ranks the U.S. 37th in the world.

Hyman then says, “To suggest people are turned away from life-saving treatment over their ability to pay is just not true.”

This is an attempt to phrase the problem in a narrow way that obscures the reality. Yes, if you collapse due to a heart attack, you will be admitted to the hospital regardless of your insurance. However, if you don’t have insurance (or have bad insurance), you will not be covered for checkups, medication, and other preventative care that would keep you from having the heart attack in the first place.


In fact, the claim that no one dies because of lack of access to healthcare was rated as a “Pants-on-Fire” lie by nonpartisan Politifact when it was recently made by a Republican politician at a town hall event.

Attempting to Take the Moral High Ground Leaves Sinclair in the Gutter

A recent commentary in which Sinclair’s Mark Hyman takes other journalists to task for ethical failings goes about as well as one might expect it to, given what viewers have long seen from Hyman himself.

The subject is an article in Politico from many months ago that quoted Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner as saying that the Trump campaign had struck a deal with Sinclair for interviews with the candidate.

(That Hyman is rehashing news from more than half a year ago is odd, although it’s at least possible it might have to do with the fact that between the recent John Oliver piece on Sinclair and rising objections to Sinclair’s attempt to purchase yet more TV stations—some even coming from fellow conservative media outlets—the company is feeling under siege.)

Hyman claims Politico—and several other news outlets that picked up the story—misrepresented the deal. The problem is that Hyman himself mischaracterizes the Politico piece, implying that it ignored information that “any fresh-faced reporter” could have found for political purposes.

Specifically, he suggests that the Politico piece suggested Sinclair made a deal with only the Trump campaign and did not offer the same deal to the Clinton campaign. He cites a retraction/apology from a blog written by a member of the Society for Professional Journalists who had based an earlier post on the Politico piece as outside, confirming evidence of malfeasance. 

Why Y2K? Classic Bait-and-Switch Argumentation

Last time around, we noted that a common rhetorical technique/fallacy is to attack one unrepresentative case as typical of the class to which it belongs. The same thing works the other way: praising a single example as a way of suggesting all others are just as good.

A case in point is Mark Hyman’s recent praise of the Trump administration’s elimination of regulations regarding the “Y2K” software glitch from days of yore.

Hyman notes that it is silly to have regulations/policies in place for something that happened 17 years ago (and didn’t do much even at the time).

Fair enough (although it’s largely a symbolic move, since apparently these regulations/policies are understandably ignored today). But if you think this is about Y2K, think again.