Talking CureHas Obama failed to sell health care reform? Or are Americans just not in the mood to buy?
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009, at 7:33 PM ET
President Obama didn't wear a bike helmet on vacation, but maybe he should when he returns to work next week. He'll need it to protect himself from the hail of incoming advice about how he should handle the health-care-reform fight. He's being told to be less liberal, change his message, stay on course, get more emotional, and (by everyone) to get more hands-on.
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StumbleUponThe president will get more involved, aides promise. He will get more specific about what he wants and build a coalition in Congress around those ideas. Then, he'll have to convince the public and hope that specificity will improve his connection with the American people. Until now, despite his constant effort to sell health care reform, the public-opinion numbers have been moving against him. In a just-released CBS poll, 40 percent approve of his handling of the health care issue, down seven points from a month ago. A plurality of Americans (47 percent) disapprove.
How did things get so low? If the president is going to make a new and successful pitch, knowing where he went wrong might help him keep from making the same mistake in the future.
A lot of smart analysts are saying that one of Obama's big mistakes—perhaps his biggest mistake—is that he talked too much about lowering health care costs as a way to shrink the budget deficit. (Slate's own Mickey Kaus has been arguing this for months.) Because the president was fixated on accounting, goes this argument, he didn't address the issue of security—people's worries that they'd lose coverage or their job or face financial ruin because of the broken system.
Is this right? Obama's budget director talked about the deficit, naturally (it's his job), and Obama has said regularly that the key to reducing the deficit is controlling health care costs, but looking back over the president's speeches, meetings, town halls and forums on health care, you discover there was something else he always talked about first and more extensively when it came to health care costs: personal security. Here is a typical comment from a town hall in Green Bay, Wis., in early June:
Every day in this country, more and more Americans are forced to worry about not just getting well, but whether they can afford to get well. Millions more wonder if they can afford the routine care necessary to stay well. Even for those who have health insurance, rising premiums are straining family budgets to the breaking point—premiums that have doubled over the last nine years, and have grown at a rate three times faster than wages. Let me repeat that: Health care premiums have gone up three times faster than wages have gone up. So desperately needed procedures and treatments are put off because the price is too high. And all it takes is a single illness to wipe out a lifetime of savings.
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Effective healthcare reform will do three things:
1. Extend healthcare coverage to people who don't have it
2. Improve care for those who have coverage already
3. Reduce or control the costs of providing coverage
Obama has failed utterly to communicate clearly how he does anything other than #1. All most Americans have been able to comprehend from the byzantine debate is that we'll raise taxes on the top 5% and use it to buy coverage for the bottom 20%.
The middle 75% shrugs, "so what?" and intuitively starts wondering if they're going to have the same coverage they have now, only with higher taxes and longer queues.
Most Americans don't see what's in it for them.
-- moodyguppy
(To reply, click here)
The first and probably the most important thing Obama needs to do is to convince the millions of Americans, especially older ones, who are satisfied with their present health coverage that medical reforms will in no way shape or form diminish the quantity or quality of what they are now getting, either by forcing them to get their medical care elsewhere or by rationing. It should be made crystal-clear (as it was in the 1930's with Social Security) that reform is in no way a piece of "social engineering" designed to redistribute wealth, so that the people now without coverage will be covered at the expense of those who have it (i. e., the poor at the expense of the middle class). I'm sorry if I sound heartless about this, but I think that it's a fact of life that this last anxiety lies at the very heart of the opposition to health reform. And those Democrats in Congress whose ideological rhetoric is doing a lot to inspire such middle-class anxieties need to be firmly told to sit down and shut up. If Obama would acknowledge the underlying reason for opposition to his initiative rather than foolishly playing the blame game and seeing it as a result of insurance industry lobbying or normal partisan politics, then he might create an atmosphere in which we could have some kind of calm and rational national dialogue on the subject. If he fails to get the point, then medical care could very easily turn out to be his personal Iraq.
-- dfs
(To reply, click here)
As the psychologist Drew Westen has often said, Republicans beat Democrats at setting the terms of political discussion, hands down. Once the opposition seized control of the health care discussion, it became difficult, if not impossible, for Obama's message to get through.
Republicans and their strategists are brilliant at coining pithy, emotionally powerful phrases that resonate with people, take root and are well-nigh impossible to dislodge. From the health care debate alone, we have the following examples: death panels, government takeover of health care, socialized medicine, "hands off my health care!" , pull the plug on Grandma. Can anyone name a similar, concise, easily understandable slogan from the pro-reform side? Anyone? Anyone?
Never mind that the opposition's catchphrases are 100% wrong---are, in fact, lies. The anti-reform forces have successfully framed the debate on their terms. How much ink has been spilled in the last six weeks debunking these myths, over and over and over again? By putting the administration and other reform advocates on the defensive, the opposition has forced them to spend time and energy rebutting the myths (which only spreads the myths further) instead of focusing on the real public benefits of reform.
-- Spenmore
(To reply, click here)