Perspective

Ezra Klein offers it.

Howard Dean, the "liberal" candidate in 2004, offered a health plan that was considerably less liberal than the current proposal being discussed in Congress.

Liberals, God bless them, always want more than what they can get. And some see any failure to get that as evidence of a betrayal of liberal principles. If single payer were a serious proposal in the current plan, some of them would say that it doesn't go far enough.

Do the current proposals go far enough? No. But do they go far enough to achieve progress over what we have now? Yes.

And saying so isn't "settling".

The Origins of "Death Panel"

I was curious about the providence of the phrase "Death Panel". Not the idea of it, just the phrase itself. It sounds just like the kind of focus-group tested marketing phrase we have come to know and love from the GOP and their fellow travelers. And it just sounded to good to have been wholely an invention of Sarah Palin.

So I went searching for the first use of it on Google News. Prior to August 7th, when she made her infamous Facebook posting, I found only a smattering of uses of the term, and all of those were either news stories about panels reviewing death penalty cases or panels reviewing transplant decisions. There was absolute zero use of the term in the context of the current health care debate.

So, at least according to the Google News archive, Sarah Palin really does appear to be the mother of this abomination.

update

Gawker has an interesting suggestion (one I considered but forgot to include in my original post): did Sarah Palin even write her Facebook entry? Palin may simply be the spokesmodel for the launch of the "Death Panel" brand. It is an idea worthy of consideration.

History of a Lie

The NY Times offers a pretty good run down of the history of the "Death Panel" lie. Unfortunately, it never calls it a lie. It simply says it is "false".

I suppose that is an improvement over "exaggeration" or "prevarication". But it still misses the fundamental point that the lie is being pushed deliberately by those who know it is a lie and they will continue to do so as long as it has traction. And calling them liars is one way to stop its traction.

"Death Panels"

Why aren't more Democrats simply calling this what it is?

A lie.

Why aren't more commentators simply calling this what it is?

A lie.

Not a prevarication.

Not an exaggeration.

A lie.

A bald-face, 100% to its core, flat-out lie.

That's what it is.

A lie.

A lie designed specifically to scare the bejesus out of old people so that a provision that is specifically designed to give them MORE freedom will get them quaking in their boots and screaming at their representatives.

They should be scared. They should be angry. But the ones they should be angry at are those who are deliberately trying to frighten them into doing their bidding.

The reason they aren't is because no one is telling them that they are being lied to.

It is a lie.

There's your talking point on this issue.

It is a lie.

It is a lie.

It is a lie.

Eyes on The Prize

How does attacking the protesters of health care reform boost the approval of health care reform?

Chris Bower's has the answer: it doesn't.

The forum of public opinion is just like any other forum. Attacking your opponent has limited utility. At best, it only makes their ideas look worse. It does nothing to make your ideas look better. So, when someone tries to make you look bad by attacking, the best approach is to simply soldier on and continue explaining why your ideas are good ones. If they are, and all the other side can do is say "Boo!", then you will win.

Losing The Message And Nailing The Landing

Has Obama "lost control of the message"? Steve Benen addresses the issue here.

I think, on its surface, it's easy to conclude that he has. If Obama has to spend time debunking nonsense like "death panels" then that is less time than he has to push a positive message about his plans.

However...

Any long-term observer of American politics has to be aware of the following: in any public policy debate of sufficient magnitude, the probability of the debate being temporarily side-tracked by nonsense approaches 100%.

In other words, it was inevitable that opponents of reform would try to derail the conversation with nonsense. And it was almost inevitable that they would succeed, if only temporarily. You lose control of the message if you fail to get it back on track.

The question for me is whether Obama was caught off guard by this nonsense. I'm not sensing that. He may not have known what form the nonsense would take, but I'm sure he knew the nonsense was coming.

No politician, no matter how skillful, ever has 100% control of the message.  They inevitably lose the groove for a beat or two. But if they end up nailing the landing at the end, who cares about the temporary bobbles along the way?

And Obama has been very good at nailing the landing.

Healthy Food

In the current health care debate, there have been lots of comparisons between how we handle health care and how we handle other social services: police, firefighters, etc. All of these comparisons have marginal utility in explaining how government can help.

Ezra Klein comes up with another comparison that might beat them all: food.

Food is more like health care than it is like cable television. We worry if people don't have enough food to eat. We worry quite a lot, in fact. So we have a variety of programs meant to ensure that people have sufficient food. If you don't have much money, you rely on these programs. As of September 2008, about 11 percent of the population was on food stamps. It's probably somewhat higher now. Millions more rely on the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, and reduced-price school lunches.

The insight that people need food has not led us to simply deregulate the agricultural sector (though that might be a good idea for other reasons) or change the tax treatment of food purchases or make it easier for rich people to donate to food banks, which is what Mackey recommends for health care. It's led us to solve, or try and solve, the problem directly by giving people money to buy food. And that works. These programs, as every Whole Foods shopper knows, haven't grown to encompass the whole population or set prices in grocery stores. If you have more money, you shop for food on your own. And if you have a lot of money, you shop at Mackey's stores. That's pretty much the model we're looking at in this iteration of health-care reform. We're also laying down some rules so grocery stores -- excuse me, health insurers -- can't simply refuse to sell you their product, or take it away after it's already been purchased..

The Roots of Fear

I'd like to cherry pick this excellent post by Hunter at dKos to make a point. Specifically, I'd like to riff on this:

They don't want government to supposedly decide who's too expensive to keep alive, with visions of "death panels" and the like -- but insurance companies are doing that now, all the time, and there's nary a peep about that.

The "they" in this sentence refers to the protesters at the health care forum who are shouting down any intelligent debate on these issues. It raises a question in my mind that has bugged me for quite some time and I only now think I'm coming to better understand: why is it that the screamers are so upset about the idea that Faceless Government Bureaucrats (FGBs) might make life or death decisions about their health care when Faceless Corporate Bureaucrats (FCBs) have been making the same decisions for years?

First of all, if we are to understand what is going on here, we have to acknowledge one cold hard fact: no health care system can provide everything for everyone. Beside the simple fact that we are all going to die, the resources necessary to provide complete and total care for everyone for every single health problem they might have (from headaches to brain tumors) just doesn't exist. Triage is at the core of all health care decisions. Treatment for some conditions will have to be prioritized. This is usually described by the dreaded word "rationing".

So let's be honest and acknowledge openly that any system for managing health care will include rationing. Of necessity.

So who gets to make the rationing decisions? Advocates for various policies would like you to believe that their system places the rationing decisions with the health care consumer. But that's another myth that we should leave behind. Yes, we sometimes are given choices of treatments. But the choices that are offered to us all exist within parameters that are decided by those previously mentioned Faceless Bureaucrats. It doesn't help any advocate's case to try to bullshit this point. The voters get this. Under any system we adopt, private or public, someone else will make decisions that will significantly impact our ability to choose our own care.

But let's not get distracted on this point. The fight we are having is not, as far as I can see, over who gets to make that first choice. While the visible argument is about public vs. private, the FGBs vs. the FCBs, I think the underlying fear that drives that argument is not WHO but HOW. And this fear exists on both sides of this debate.

Those who advocate for public health care fear that the profit motive of corporations leads the FCBs to make cold decisions about health care options based purely on profit-loss statements with no consideration for the well being of individuals (result: excluding pre-existing conditions, cutting benefits just when you need them the most, etc.).

But, those who advocate against public health care fear that the "best intentions" of the FGBs will lead to them making judgments on "value to society" that will be based on prejudices they don't agree with (result: "death panels", etc.).

Now, I happen to be driven more by the fear of the profit motive. But I can understand the fear of the social engineers. If I were like those on the other side and I didn't trust those social engineers or their motives, I might conclude that it would be better to throw my fate on the mercy of "cold hard numbers" generated by accountants rather than the "well meaning" intentions of those who sit on government run health care panels. If my care is denied under the former method, I wouldn't have to feel that I was invalidated because some part of society judged me as being less than worthy (and if I happened to have certain prejudices against those who might make those decisions ... well ... that certainly wouldn't make me any more comfortable with the results.)

This, I think, is the primary fear that is being used to drive the screamers: that the FGBs, the social engineers, the do-gooders will sit in judgment of my self-worth. And how dare THEY sit in judgment of ME?

I doubt you will ever be able to find a strong common ground between these two sides. But those who advocate for public health care might do a better job of easing the fears of the other side if they were to at least acknowledge the legitimacy of these fears. And yes, I do think they are legitimate, even if they aren't always well founded. While I would still rather trust in the judgment of people who are not entirely driven by the profit motive(*), I acknowledge that the fear of poor judgments by social engineers is not, inherently, an irrational fear.

(* - For one thing, I don't buy into the belief that the "cold hard calculations" of the profit motive are entirely devoid of the kind of personal value judgments that the screamers fear would come from government bureaucrats. But then I'm not free market ideologue.)