In yesterday’s N&R, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dick Polman writes that Democrats need to “go for the gut” and appeal more to Americans’ emotions. There’s just one problem in Polman’s mind:
But that is not what Democrats do.
They are cerebral by nature. They dislike emotional appeals. They fear that if they get too pugnacious, some voters might get mad. But as clinical psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen argues in his new book The Political Brain, this fear of gut-level combat is a big reason the Democratic Party keeps losing national elections.
Funny, but I thought Democrats did nothing but gut-level combat.
Sure, they say Bush got us into the mess in Iraq with a simplistic good vs. evil mentality and that we should get out as soon as possible. But, based on what was said during the recent YouTube debate, the Democratic presidential candidates are just now realizing that withdrawal from Iraq is a little more complicated than it might seem.
Then there’s the healthcare issue. During the YouTube debate, North Carolina’s own John Edwards slammed his fist on the podium and loudly asked when “we” were going to do something about health care in this country. More locally, Yes!Weekly editor Brian Cleary recently wrote about seeing ‘Sicko’ and, predictably, getting mad as hell. He eventually took a deep breath:
I hope everybody sees this as a moral issue, not merely a matter of class distinction. If Moore’s numbers are to be believed – and according to the websites for Center for Disease Control and the Institute of Medicine, they are – there are 50 million of us without any kind of health care at all, and that 18,000 of us will die this year as a result of inadequate or unattainable health care. That’s a lot of us.
And I hope everybody understands the importance of using pronouns like “we” and “us” when speaking about this issue instead of “they” and “them.” Everyone is touched by a health care system that fails to achieve its primary responsibility: to care for our health. This problem belongs to all of us.
Pretty typical, taking a very complex issue and turning it into both an emotional and moral issue that requires a collectivist response. It’s just not that simple. With health care, you actually have two issues: the cost of services and the delivery of services. With a single payer system, the cost of services would be eliminated in theory, although it’s been pointed out that Edwards either has no clue about how to play for his plan or is deceiving the American public.
But there is absolutely no reason to believe the delivery of services would be improved. The advances in products, procedures and specialisties that have evolved over the last, say, 30 years are simply too much for the government to get its arms around. For some reason, the maze of uneven care cited so much in the current system doesn’t exist in the single-payer system. Do advocates for universal healthcare really believe the government is going to rubber stamp every procedure? There’s no reason to believe that, even if doctors are placed on a flat salary.
If you do believe it, read what FreeMarket Cure says:
The truth is that single-payer systems often interfere with treatment decisions. For example, most single-payer systems have bureaucracies that delay the approval of new drugs, preventing patients from using them. Alice Mahon, a former member of the British parliament, needed the drug Lucentis to slow her macular degeneration. Because of delays due to the National Health Service not yet having approved Lucentis at the time of her diagnosis, Mahon lost much of the sight in her left eye.
In 1999, Canadian patient Daniel Smith, a cystic fibrosis sufferer, and his doctors agreed that he needed a lung transplant. But his surgery was cancelled by administrators because an open hospital bed could not be found.
So much for medical decisions being left to patients and their doctors.
So I’m not really sure where Polman gets his theory. Democrats have been running on emotion for as long as I can remember. Eventually it got to me.
