[BartSimpson]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8474611.stm

Quote:

The Republicans' shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US.

Political scientist Dr David Runciman gives his view on why there is often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.

Last year, in a series of "town-hall meetings" across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama's proposed healthcare reforms.

What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.

Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough.

But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help.

In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.

Anger

Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal.

Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?

Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?

It might be tempting to put the whole thing down to what the historian Richard Hofstadter back in the 1960s called "the paranoid style" of American politics, in which God, guns and race get mixed into a toxic stew of resentment at anything coming out of Washington.

But that would be a mistake.


Drew Westen argues that stories rather than facts convince voters
If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.

They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.

As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. And that makes anything as complex or as messy as healthcare reform a very hard sell.

Stories not facts

In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side.

He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:

Gore: "Under the governor's plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he's modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries."

Bush: "Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers.

g to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math. It's trying to scare people in the voting booth."

Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense - but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.

"Obama's administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans' Depression, caused by the Bush administration's ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him."

Reverse revolution

Thomas Frank, the author of the best-selling book What's The Matter with Kansas, is an even more exasperated Democrat and he goes further than Mr Westen.

He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.


Thomas Frank thinks that voters have become blinded to their real interests
Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

"You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

"It's like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy."

As Mr Frank sees it, authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made.

And the ultimate sin in modern politics is appearing to take the voters for granted.

This is a culture war but it is not simply being driven by differences over abortion, or religion, or patriotism. And it is not simply Red states vs. Blue states any more. It is a war on the entire political culture, on the arrogance of politicians, on their slipperiness and lack of principle, on their endless deal making and compromises.

And when the politicians say to the people protesting: 'But we're doing this for you', that just makes it worse. In fact, that seems to be what makes them angriest of all.

[BartSimpson]

So the other day I wrote a comment wondering why leftists are so fascinated by American health care and here comes this fellow who is having a dyspeptic fit because the voters in Massachussetts more or less said no to Obamacare.

To me, this guy perfectly illustrates what I mean about leftists who are pointlessly obsessed with our health care and the real issue here is that they are utterly incapable of fathoming what it is that makes America different from them.

[Mr_Canada]

Absolutely excellent read, I agree completely.

[BartSimpson]

Mr_Canada wrote:

Absolutely excellent read, I agree completely.

Another case in point. You think that centralized health care is in my best interest while I think that the freedom of choice in the current competitive system is in my best interest.

Which gets to that basic difference. I want the barest necessary minimum of government presence in my life and people like yourself want the government to be your mommy from cradle-to-grave.

And that's fine if that's what you want in your country.

But do try to get your head around the idea that not everyone in the world needs someone to hand them a binky every day.

[xerxes]

You may think it as an odd obsession, but it's still a valid question. In the case of health care, every westernised country on Earth has some kind of government administered health care system even countries with a fraction of the US' resources. Not one person in any of those countries has a problem with that arrangement.

Only in America is such a concept considered evil and the first step on the road to Communist serfdom. Wereas I would argue, the US model of health insurance and for profit medicine is an immoral system.

You may not want to hear it, but that reality perplexes damn near everyone on earth.

[xerxes]

BartSimpson wrote:

Mr_Canada wrote:

Absolutely excellent read, I agree completely.

Another case in point. You think that centralized health care is in my best interest while I think that the freedom of choice in the current competitive system is in my best interest.

Which gets to that basic difference. I want the barest necessary minimum of government presence in my life and people like yourself want the government to be your mommy from cradle-to-grave.

And that's fine if that's what you want in your country.

But do try to get your head around the idea that not everyone in the world needs someone to hand them a binky every day.

I agree. But unlike you, I'd prefer it, if when times get tough for reasons beyond my control, the government has my back if only for a little bit.

The kind of freedom from the government you're pining for doesn't exist anymore.

[Robair]

xerxes wrote:

The kind of freedom from the government you're pining for doesn't exist anymore.

Bart wants freedom from a government that is supposed to answer to it's voters (really it's campaign contributors) over freedom from a corporation that answers to it's stockholders.

It is mind boggling.

[BartSimpson]

xerxes wrote:

I agree. But unlike you, I'd prefer it, if when times get tough for reasons beyond my control, the government has my back if only for a little bit.

The kind of freedom from the government you're pining for doesn't exist anymore.

It's attributed to Gerald Ford and I agree with it:

The government that is powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take it all away.

And if the kind of freedom I want no longer exists then that underlines my concerns.

And, yes, I want government around for when times are hard. I support having police, firemen, and the military for those reasons. But when some puke in Washington decides to refuse care to one of my loved ones because they're 'too old' or the care is 'too expensive' when neither of those concerns has been an issue before, then I will be very, very upset.

[BartSimpson]

Robair wrote:

Bart wants freedom from a government that is supposed to answer to it's voters (really it's campaign contributors) over freedom from a corporation that answers to it's stockholders.

It is mind boggling.

Actually, corporations are involved in health care for profit. The role of government in this forum is to make sure that there is healthy compettion in that market so that the corporations are responsive to people and so that prices are kept within reason.

The very best thing that government could do is to restrict the power of lawyers to sue doctors and etc. over trivialities. That would drop costs immensely and make it cheaper for people to buy decent coverage.

[Mr_Canada]

I'm just personally offended at the cultural view that life is a commodity.

[BartSimpson]

Mr_Canada wrote:

I'm just personally offended at the cultural view that life is a commodity.

I had no idea you were pro-life. Good on you.

[Mr_Canada]

Pro-life, haha.

but yeah.

Basically, I see that you don't want government to treat you like a baby. I get that. I fully understand that. But I simply just oppose human health and discovery is controlled only by money earned from dirty capitalist horror story corporations, who use illegitimate and disgusting ways to get money from the customer, in a horrible twist of Adam Smith's capitalism..

[Mr_Canada]

No one wants to be babied. But I think of it as more of a safeguard from a dirty practice. I consider corporations to be worse then any government in their power and how they exercise it. So I simply feel that Public Healthcare is safer for society in the case of costs, which affects health, poverty, and quality of life..

The profit motive for health and life is immoral to me. To me, that is evil. Soulless.

[BartSimpson]

Mr_Canada wrote:

But I simply just oppose human health and discovery is controlled only by money earned from dirty capitalist horror story corporations, who use illegitimate and disgusting ways to get money from the customer, in a horrible twist of Adam Smith's capitalism..

Yet you enjoy the fruits and benefits of that very system.

I'm not going to bother listing all of the medical equipment and medicines and procedures that have been invented by private industry just because there are so many. But the fact of life is that absent a profit motive there is no reason to invest money and time in health research. Medical research with socialized medicine becomes a government budget item that will be cut, borrowed from, stolen from, and etc. as is politically expedient.

Right now untold billions are invested in medical research and if government takes control of health care then all of that money will flee from health care to go somewhere else and for damn sure the government will not make up the shortfall.

In sum, most of the world's medical advances come out of the USA. If we adopt the socialist model then we will stop producing those advances. Simple as that.

[Donny_Brasco]

BartSimpson wrote:

But when some puke in Washington decides to refuse care to one of my loved ones because they're 'too old' or the care is 'too expensive' when neither of those concerns has been an issue before, then I will be very, very upset.

Are you saying that you prefer some puke at the insurance company do the identical thing?

And furthermore here in Canada we spend money on every usless human being that is Canadian weather they deserve it or not. So you and your family would be safe!

Just kidding but you get the point eh?