The GOP healthcare fight
Good post by John Edgell in Congressional Quarterly:
Last week was action-packed for those fans keeping score in the game that is health care reform.
First, there was the strategic placement of a memo prepared by pollster Frank Luntz for Republicans in the House. Luntz, the political equivalent of Donald Trump when it comes to gaining media attention for himself, presented a 26-page memo and Power-point presentation of 10 easy-to-digest message points for those seeking to undermine any substantive health care proposal in Congress.
The Luntz memo should be viewed as an excellent road map of the upcoming barriers likely placed in the next several months by opponents of large-scale changes in our current health care delivery system
Luntz was not circumspect at all in his advice to his conservative colleagues, signaling a message campaign centered largely on scare tactics about the perceived rationing of access to patients’ choice of doctors and hospitals. “The health care horror stories from Canada & Co. do resonate, but you have to humanize them,” the memo proposes.
In exploiting collective doubts and suspicions held by a meaningful percentage of the American public about the Canadian health care system, Luntz concludes that “nothing turns people against what the Democrats are trying to do more immediately and intensely than the specter of having to wait for tests and treatment thanks to a government takeover of health care by nameless, faceless bureaucrats. The polling data is conclusive.”
Of course the last time we went down this path, in 1993 with the Clinton White House health care plan, Americans got their fair dosage of television commercials featuring the fictional couple “Harry and Louise.”
That advocacy campaign, underwritten by a coalition of large insurance firms, for-profit hospitals and drug companies, effectively humanized fears too about “rationing” access to favorite doctors, and is largely credited with stopping the Clinton health care plan in its tracks.
This time, though, will we see instead “Pierre and Monique,” an updated fictional Canadian couple equivalent, who invite themselves into America’s living rooms? Again, how does one say “with government-run health care, politicians and bureaucrats make your health care decisions for you,” in French?
Don’t laugh, since Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus , D-Mont., whose panel is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to large-scale legislative advocacy campaigns, surely isn’t.
“You can choose your own doctor,” Mr. Baucus said to reporters last week. “You can choose your own health plan. There’s total choice here. I do not want to say this defensively, but this is not a big government plan.”
Thus, the seeds of doubt about whether rationing health care benefits have begun to take root, and virtually all organically. Why else would congressional Democrats, namely its leaders in the Senate, demand from the White House senior adviser David Axelrod a cogent, consistent and sustained messaging plan, something that Hill health care policymakers feel was sorely lacking during the 1993 Clinton reform effort?
So give Luntz his due credit for foretelling perhaps the greatest vulnerability in any health care reform proposal: the possibility that those Americans currently with good health care benefits, provided largely either by an employer or the government, will fear a “rationing of health care: more so than the current flawed system. Still, there’s no evidence yet that Luntz, even with his memo and power-point presentation, has enticed many deep-pocketed opponents willing to underwrite a “Pierre and Monique”-style advocacy campaign capable of taking down any health care overhaul.
Of course the main reason there’s no open opposition is that there’s nothing substantive to oppose. Why else would you see the primary beneficiaries of maintaining the status quo — insurance firms, for-profit hospitals, drug firms, and other potential overhaul opponents — line up in the White House East Room with President Obama to announce that they would voluntarily forego $2 trillion in revenues over the next 10 years? …
