When the betting line opened this morning, Emotion was a 16 1/2 point favorite over Reason. That merely reflects the way we human beings are wired. In the book Freakinomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the authors cite Peter Sandman, who makes his living essentially getting people who are freaking out to calm down or getting people who are calm to freak out, depending on who is signing his check. Mr. Sandman (bring me a dream - I know, too easy but I couldn't help myself) deals in risk communication, and his formula is that risk = hazard (i.e. real danger) + outrage. When hazard is high and outrage is low, people underreact; when hazard is low and outrage is high, people overreact. Thus, the guy who tips the scales at 395 and whose blood pressure rivals that of a giraffe has little fear of the heart attack that is very likely in his future, but he is terrified of the dirty bomb Osama bin Laden might unleash on his remote trailer park, killing all 419 residents.
Please understand, I am absolutely, positively NOT suggesting that one side of the health care debate is based on reason while the other is based on mushy headed emotion. Both sides have compelling, well-reasoned arguments, and both sides also appeal to emotion as well as logic. However, the momentum shift in the debate seems to be based more on emotion, rage, anger, and particularly fear than on cogency. I think that's unfortunate -- predictable, but unfortunate nonetheless. Proponents of the plan have been put back on their heels playing defense, forced to counter fear and misinformation with what they claim to be the facts. Even leaving the essential and understandable element of mistrust out of the equation, in a case such as this, even if the proponents' claims were somehow provable, I fear that facts still might not have a fighting chance against misinformation heavily laden with emotion.
My father, a devout Catholic who was very much in the sanctity of life camp, chose hospice care for his final days. I was there. Though his body was weak, he held court in his bedroom all weekend as everyone came by to visit. We were laughing, enjoying one another and valuing the time we still had together. Tuesday morning he peacefully slipped away. No "death panel" had him make that decision. A health plan that allows coverage for physician counseling with respect to end of life options is no more forced genocide of the elderly than the status quo where insurance companies pay for vasectomies and tubal ligation is forced sterilization of everyone who doesn't conform to some ideal. The government already insures millions of elderly Americans, and there is no evidence whatsoever of any designs to kick Aunt Myrtle's plug out of the wall, but that is the power of emotion over reason.
The biggest winner so far in this whole sordid affair is the insurance industry. Through the miracle of "my enemy's enemy is my friend", insurance companies have pulled off a major coup. Privately, their executives must be enjoying a belly laugh as they watch the raucous applause from the same people when speakers alternately rail against the government getting involved because they just spend, spend, spend without any concern for how much debt they run up, and because they are so miserly that to save money, they will deny care to the less productive. The insurers should drop to their knees and thank God these people somehow can't see that those two things are mutually exclusive and the latter is pretty far-fetched. Checking sports, Emotion 51 Reason 9. If the insurance companies can somehow manage to be perceived as money-be-damned altruists who just want to help people, maybe the government can steal a page from their playbook. Perhaps Press Secretary Robert Gibbs should be replaced by a tiny lizard who sounds eerily like David Beckham.
