By Emily Langer Emily Langer Obituary writer Email Bio Follow May 8 at 10:15 AM In the hands of many Washington reporters, the ins and outs of Medicare and Medicaid, the Clinton administration’s failed health-care overhaul and President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act could be insufferably technical. But health policy is also intensely personal.
“He was almost certainly the best health-policy reporter we’ve ever had,” Drew Altman, the president and chief executive of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and founding publisher of Kaiser Health News, said in an interview. Such was Mr. Pear’s commitment to detail, Altman said, that he toted around fact sheets and would call at “2, 3 and 4 a.m., working a story literally to death to get it exactly right.
Mr. Pear was vastly more comfortable reporting news rather than making it. But his prolific front-page bylines made him a supporting character in the Clinton health-care saga of the 1990s, in which the administration, with leadership from then-first lady Hillary Clinton, failed dramatically in its quest to enact universal health-care coverage.
“The longer Bob Pear and his ilk are allowed to roam the landscape kicking interest groups until they bark, the more it will seem as if Mr. Clinton’s reform plan is full of terrible disadvantages that rival plans somehow magically avoid,” Kinsley continued. “Cut a deal, Mr. President. Quick. Before Robert Pear strikes again.”
At the time, the article noted, officials in the White House and on Capitol Hill “all but” conceded that there was “no chance of passing universal health insurance legislation” that year. But the legislation was not yet officially dead, and Altman described the article, with its unvarnished portrayal of a “collapse,” as “a brave story,” one that “other journalists at other newspapers were immediately under pressure to follow.
Fake news “reporter”