Letter to the Editor

[cos]

Last night, I submitted this as a letter to the editor to USA Today:

For decades, private for-profit insurance companies have been spreading fear about "government run health insurance". Despite the fact that people on Medicare - run by the government - are more satisfied with their insurance than people on private insurance, the private insurance companies have been telling us that national health care wouldn't work, because the government can't run a good insurance system, and we're all better off with private insurance. Obama's plan puts their claims to the test, and it's time to put up or shut up.

Obama proposes a compromise between a national single payer system, and the private insurance we have now: he wants to put a public health insurance option in the same market as private companies, to let people choose and see what works better.

Insurance companies' complaints about "unfair competition" are a smokescreen. They want to mislead us into a conversation about how to be fair to insurance companies, while they continue being unfair to the American people.

What the for-profit insurance companies are really saying is that they fear the government can run a better health insurance - that satisfies people more, and leaves us healthier, at a lower cost. They may be right. Congress owes it to us to create a public option so we can try it and find out. Stop worrying about the health of the insurance companies, and care for the health of the American people for a change.

Comments

[awfief.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, this is the framing and all.

But I did read the thread -- you explained why you weren't following the "is it fair?" trap. However, I think that the question "is it fair or not?" deserved an answer *after* you'd already explained why it's not a good question at all.

I think it's useful to say "that's not the point! The point is that it's a smokescreen." But it's even more useful, for people who *understand* that it's a smokescreen, to go back and actually answer the question...ie, "not only is it a smokescreen, but the claim that it's unfair is wrong."

Plus, I think that using the facts, those who oppose the gov't health care plan could have made a convincing *logical* argument about why it *would become* unfair, in addition to making their *emotional* argument.

[cos]

Ahh, okay. I worry, though, that getting too deply into the details of answering the question, will focus people back on ... the details of the question, and make them forget how fundamentally wrong the whole question is in the first place.

For example, one of the points you brought up was the government's ability to use its size to negotiate lower prices. In the context of "unfair competition" that seems like a possibly good point, but if you step back and look at the real goals of health care reform, you realize that that's actually a great reason *to* have a public plan - if it can do that, who cares if it's "unfair", it's *better*. That's the sort of thing that worrying about the fake "unfair competition" question can obscure. In some cases, the very things we want to accomplish may turn out go hand in hand with competing "unfairly", and where that turns out to be true, those are things we should pursue.

Plus, I think that using the facts, those who oppose the gov't health care plan could have made a convincing *logical* argument about why it *would become* unfair, in addition to making their *emotional* argument.

Perhaps the could've if they'd wanted to more, or tried harder. I don't know. Probably not - in the general public, this is engaged on a level of broader arguments, not details. What I see permeating the public is the idea that the public option might be unfair competition for private insurance companies. I don't see people convinced that they know a bunch of detailed facts that explain why that is or isn't true, I just see people bringing it up as a general concept. Blowing away that smokescreen is my goal here.