How Washington is screwing up health care reform – and why it may take a revolt to fix it
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, 3 September 2009
Let’s start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.
The health care industry is the epitome of “the American experiment”, a nightmare that only the darkest of criminal minds would execute and sustain.
“The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.”
Okay, this is a leap–but brand expert John Tantillo writes on Fox Forum, looking at politics from a branding perspective, which i think provides an original and insightful view point. Tantillo published a post on his marketing blog (separate from Fox Forum) about how the idea of public health insurance doesn’t mesh with the American brand, and is therefore bound to fail. http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/2009/08/11/john-tantillos-brand-winner-and-loser-pg-and-the-selling-of-health-care.aspx
Maybe the real branding reason the reform is failing is that real reform cannot survive within the toxic brand of the current state of the American gvt–lobbied by special interests and reined in by buried, irrelevant measures and concessions and pork barrel spending.
If the current operation of the U.S. gvt itself is not consistent with core American brand essentials (I like to, need to think that this is the case), then maybe a major overhaul of government (a ‘brandover’) would be a necessary (albeit perhaps impossible..this is theoretical..) prerequisite to any real, meaningful reform.
Assuming that such a thing were possible (ex. getting rid of pork barrel system…where’s the system of oft-overused system of Initiatives at the federal level–maybe that’s what we’d need), health care reform itself when then have to be Marketed with Costs Savings front and center–that with a public option, tax payers would end up contributing Less tax money to uninsured people’s health care, because preventive health care and work done in clinics, out-patient care, etc., rather than done at the ER, would mean Less overall spending. (If you don’t have insurance, you do get care anyway….it’s just more expensive, last-minute, and ends up bankrupting you and/or leaving you with bad credit..and the taxpayers still end up footing the bill.)
I know that these ideas are being mentioned, but I rarely seem them put First in an appeal to those who (understandably) are concerned with more gvt spending and a loss of personal responsibility and independence in our society. Instead, more typically, the appeal is from a human rights angle. This approach sidesteps the issues of concern to those who are wary of a single-payer or any other gvt program at all, puts them on the defensive by grossly characterizing their position as a monstrous one, and belittles (while perhaps going a ways toward validating) their real concerns and fears.
The first step to convincing the unconvinced is to understand and respect where they’re coming from. But without first reforming the way legislation is passed so that individuals’ interests are put before those of special interest groups’, I’m not very hopeful.