Health care reform is self-evidently good, if you don’t listen

Health care reform supporters are befuddled by the nationwide anger they have created. As a result, the President and members of Congress make the false assumption that if they can just get the information out to people and sooth “fears,” they can save health care reform.

Assumptions can be dangerous.

Let’s put aside some of the extreme misunderstandings like the death panel for euthanizing seniors. Those beliefs are outliers and have no more place in the health care discussion than Obama’s birth certificate or tales of Bush blowing up the World Trade Center have in any intelligent discussion. The fact is that most Americans understand the concept of the proposed health care reforms. The fundamentals are just not that complicated. The misunderstanding, the failure to understand, lies almost entirely with supporters of the proposed health care bills, and not with the opponents of those bills.

For the bill’s supporters, that last statement is tough to accept. Stay with me.

The right kind of health care reform should be very popular in the U.S. A CNN poll taken in March found that more than 75% of Americans were dissatisfied with the total cost of health care. This high percentage of dissatisfied respondents means that dissatisfaction crosses party lines. I am willing to bet that if you could cut costs system-wide and reduce the health care bureaucracy, the polls would find far more than 75% satisfied with the reforms. Yet, according to the latest Gallup Poll, 49% disapprove of Obama’s handling health care.

How can we explain this discrepancy?

Americans of both parties want health care reformed, but not in the manner Congress is considering. The more Americans learn about the proposed reforms, the more the support for those reforms drops off. Congress and the President are failing to understand that support for health care reform does not mean support the current crop of proposed reform bills.

Supporters of the current proposals are making an assumption that their plans for reform are so good, so self-evidently right, that if they could just get the rest of us to understand their plans than everything will be okay. That belief has caused supporters to fail to listen, and as a result, rendered them incapable of understanding what a growing percentage of Americans, across party lines, mean by “health care reform.”

This blog is based on the Ten Principles of Mind Your Own Damn Business Politics. Principle 9 reads;

Those that disagree with your views are not necessarily bad. They might have valid ideas. Listen. You might be able to persuade them to your view but first you have to listen.

The President, Congress, and the mainstream media, are only listening to criticisms of the proposed bills to the degree needed to spit out a rote answer.

Just as supporters believe that their proposals are self-evidently good for this country, opponents, members of both parties, believe that the proposed health care reforms are self-evidently wrong for this country. Their concerns go beyond the specifics of the bills under consideration. Opponents know that the President and key members of Congress want to put health care on a path toward a single payer, universal coverage system that many Americans don’t want. Yes, President Obama, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, and many others have made their goals clear, and now many Americans are making their opposition clear.

Americans also understand that most government run programs are overly costly, inefficient, and highly bureaucratic, and people don’t want their health care to fall under government control and become worse than it is already. Cost concerns are multiplied by the understanding that moving 20% of the U.S. economy under the government’s control will be a massive shift in our economic and political system. While many Americans support this shift to a more controlled economy, there is also strong opposition.

Health care reform supporters need to listen. Only then is there a chance that they’ll recognize that their ideas are just as self-evidently wrong to a majority of Americans.

Tagged as: Democrat, economic crisis, economy, Health care, health insurance, healthcare, insurance, obama, President Obama, public option, single payer, single payer health care, tea bagger, Tea Party, town hall meeting, universal health care, universal healthcare