Insurance bad faith may be too difficult for 21st Century Journalism. Hear what I have to say and decide for yourself.
My example is taken from the Code of Federal Regulations. I will not embarrass you by telling you the grade I got in Administrative Law in Law School. (Actually, I will not embarrass myself and so I will not tell you the grade.) It is enough for my present purpose to say that I have recently learned some things about how Federal Rules and Regulations are written, adopted, and issued. This will be a broad, general overview so if you find yourself thinking of many exceptions, that will be natural.
Most rules are published in draft with a Comment Period. The Comment Period can vary from proposed rule to proposed rule, but it is usually 30 or 60 days. The Comment Period begins when a proposed rule is officially published for public comment. The key concept here is that during that entire time it is only a proposed rule. It is not yet the law. The corporate media very often gets this wrong. It's as if they cannot process the actual concept.
The current regime posted a draft rule on June 12. It would purport to abolish LGBTQ rights under the Affordable Care Act by allowing discrimination. The corporate media reported that the current regime changed the law that day. The regime did not. They did not have the power. 21st Century Journalism conferred that power on them, but they did not have it before that.
Further, what the current regime published on June 12 was a draft rule expressly slated for official publication on June 19, a week later, when the official Comment Period will begin. So, the earliest that the proposed discriminatory rollback rule can take effect is 60 days (the end of the Comment Period for this particular proposed Rule) from Friday, June 19 (not from Friday, June 12), or what I calculate as the end of business on Tuesday, August 18, 2020. (Courts will certainly have something to say about all this, as well.)
Accordingly, diary your calendars to leave your Comment on regulations.gov against the regime's proposed discrimination in healthcare against LGBTQ patients, by Tuesday, August 18, 2020.
But back to the point at hand before coming to the end of this article. It is a simple point, in the end: If the commercial media cannot get proposed rules right, do not expect that they will get anything about insurance bad faith right when they report on any of its developments. Rather, take advantage of what 21st Century Journalism does well and use their reports of developments as the starting point for your own forensic investigation, i.e., your own research in this case. As the respected journalist John Nichols has himself very recently observed, the media are very good at reporting on a fire but not so good at reporting on a movement.
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