A Second Look | All the Buzz about the Health Care Debate and Luntz’s Talking Points

via Sen. Jeff Merkley: Words Designed to Kill Health Care Reform.

Dr. Frank Luntz

But I was shocked when I read a memo from Republican strategist Dr. Frank Luntz laying out plans to dismantle any effort to give all Americans access to quality health care. Dr. Luntz, the man who developed language designed to promote preemptive war in Iraq and distract from the severity of global warming, is at it again — this time with a messaging strategy designed to sink our historic opportunity for health care reform.

Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) is right of course. The cons have nothing to offer here, only “no”. The best scenario for them and the corporations they back is for the status quo to stay. They like it just as it is – enormous profits coming in to big pharma and to HMOs – profits on your sickness.

What I’ve read about Dr. Luntz and his “playbook” (which is supposed to strike fear in the hearts of the left), is that it contains nothing that is not easily debunked.

Luntz wants to get to the American people with the emotional message that socialized medicine is a disaster. He wants the argument against a public health plan to get personal. Let’s take A Secondhand Look at a couple of Luntz’s points via Salon.com:

(1) Humanize your approach. Abandon and exile ALL references to the “healthcare system.” From now on, healthcare is about people. Before you speak, think of the three components of tone that matter most: Individualize. Personalize. Humanize.

But healthcare has always been about people and their varying degree of ability to access the health care they need without going bankrupt in the process. This is why we are where we are right now. People can’t afford health care, and businesses can’t afford to sustain their retired worker’s health plans indefinitely. The issue has always been about the crushing weight of getting sick when one can’t afford to do so, and the horror story that happens when we do. Luntz says:

(4) The arguments against the Democrats’ healthcare plan must center around “politicians,” “bureaucrats,” and “Washington” … not the free market, tax incentives, or competition. Stop talking economic theory and start personalizing the impact of a government takeover of healthcare…

There are already countless horror stories about how “insurance” and “HMO” “bureaucrats” have hired doctors and others to determine what is covered and what is not covered, mostly not. The doctor gets paid bonuses for denying health care. The more claims that are denied, the bigger the insurance company’s bottom line. There is a ton of information out there on insurance companies operating in bad faith. Luntz goes on:

(5) The healthcare denial horror stories from Canada & Co. do resonate, but you have to humanize them….There is a better approach. “In countries with government run healthcare, politicians make YOUR healthcare decisions. THEY decide if you’ll get the procedure you need, or if you are disqualified because the treatment is too expensive or because you are too old. We can’t have that in America.”

You can use Luntz’s approach in the same way to make the point for public health care:

“In the United States, the only industrialized country that does not have single-payer health care, HMO and insurance company bureaucrats make YOUR healthcare decisions. THEY decide if you’ll get the procedure you need or if you are disqualified because the treatment is too expensive or because you are too old. We can’t have that in America.”

See how easy this is debunked?

You can also say that government agency employees are people, not robots, and they actually run the Medicare program pretty well. The Department of Defense, which is also a bunch of PEOPLE, have contracted out the operation of one of the nation’s most successful socialized medicine programs, TRICARE. The program has been running for over a decade.

Sen. Merkley brings up another good point. Luntz’s polls must have shocked him so much that he felt a need to rush his talking points out to the Republicans. The polling data must have shown that Americans were overwhelmingly for a public health plan. Sen. Merkley:

What we are seeing, yet again, is that while Dr. Luntz and his clients may have excellent polling data, they are utterly clueless about what the American people want.

It may look as though they are clueless on the surface. Contrarily, the polling data does in fact show them what the American people want and they are out to put a stop to it.