Many readers will remember my love of the book Made to Stick. That book makes clear that ideas work when you can express the concept in a way that sticks. The political right has energized their debate following that principle. Now I personally believe that the sticky messages are incorrect. Health care reform is does not contain “death panels”, but the phrase captures a portion of the populace.
While President Obama is an elegant speaker, he has not captured a message to use in this debate. Pelosi and Reid are miserable speakers, and their op-ed was condescending.
Thus we have a debate characterized by conservative “values” on one side and liberal “values” on the other side, but the conservative “values” are more easily translated to most people.
I was playing golf on Saturday. My cart partner is an extremely bright liberal. Yet he had accepted the conservative interpretation of health care reform. He believed the sticky messages.
The administration and especially Congress has made the mistake of assuming that they are doing good and that everyone will understand them. The bill has major flaws (all bills seem to have major flaws) but the underlying concepts have merit. They do not seem to understand the public and they do not seem to understand how to formulate the message.
Without a clear message, one cannot win a debate. The logical high ground works in academe, but not in the hearts of the people. At a political level, this debate is fascinating because it is not a debate on issues but rather a debate for followers.
The Democrats may lose this game, because they do not understand the rules. This discussion has nothing to do with logic.
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And possibly, rather than just healthcare, it’s a debate about just how big Americans want the federal govt. to be. Being the latest in the line of interventions into the private sector, healthcare just happens to be where people are finally starting to question just what the heck is going on.
When you have unlimited money, nobody has to pull the plug. You can keep going on and on long past the point of futility. Not even the United States is that rich.
At some point, in all systems that could possibly work in this real world, somebody’s got to make the call. X individual patient doesn’t get more than palliative care from here on. It might also be X class of patients doesn’t get more than palliative care. In either case those decisions are death sentences.
In a politicized system, such decisions are political and there’s going to be a panel somewhere making those calls on political criteria. It’s just a fact of life. In a non-politicized system, you have a family member making the call, an appointed guardian, or a doctor that hopefully has Hippocrates firmly in mind. I think that the former option is much worse than the latter. Whyever would you prefer the former?