Reframing the health care debate

In doesn’t matter much if you are far right, far left or near center, the current debate over health care reform isn’t working, and that’s a different issue than if health care itself is or isn’t working.

Name calling and labels, complete with all the dreaded and ambiguous “isms” only serve to further entrench personal biases and preconceptions. The louder the argument, the deeper we retreat into familiar territory. We need to abandon the notion that someone with a different political opinion is either of a different species, dishonest or morally corrupt. What we need is to reframe the issue and use that new frame to search for solutions.

In order to reframe, we need to establish as given some premises any reasonable person can agree to. Let’s take the two central issues: health and money.

Premise one: Health is a good thing both for the individual and the nation. Unless you are pathological, you would rather be healthy than sick. Also, in general, you would rather have someone you pass randomly on the street healthy, rather than sick. From a national point of view, healthy people are productive, thus adding to the economy and general prosperity. Sick people are not productive, thus drawing from the economy and reducing the general prosperity.

Premise two: Cost matters. If I promised everyone full health care coverage for a yearly fee of $100,000, most would balk at this. If I made the same offer for $1, everyone would line up to take advantage. So, most people would agree to the following, “Give me great health coverage, and give it to me cheap.”

If everyone, left, right and center is still with me, we can start to reframe the debate. We all want our medical needs taken care of, but we don’t want it to bankrupt us personally or as a society. It doesn’t matter if we carry tea bags or anti war signs, we are all the same on these basic issues. Now we can throw away the labels and see each other for what we are, humans who will eventually get sick and die, but who would like as many healthy years as possible.

Not being a doctor, politician or economist, I can’t sit here and generate the perfect frame for this debate, but I’ll bet that groups of doctors, politicians and economists can sit down armed with these basic human needs and create a frame that most people can buy into. From there, the road to health care reform is a “yellow brick” expressway.