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Dorn: Regain control of the debate
Edwin Dorn, LOCAL CONTRIBUTOR
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
After the battering that his health care proposal has taken in recent weeks, President Barack Obama could use few good words. I offer three: choice, quality and affordability.
Those are the key ideas that I have distilled from the administration's description of its plan. They also are the concerns that have risen above the din at health care town meetings.
Right now, the administration's most succinct statement about health care reform runs several hundred words on the whitehouse.gov web site, and none of those words stands out as being more important than any of the others. Lacking crisp language of its own, the White House has had to respond to the vocabulary of its opposition: "government takeover," "socialism," even the vile "death panel" canard. When you let your opponents define the terms of a debate, your chances of winning are slim.
Of course, my three words don't say it all; each of them needs a bit of elaboration. So the opening pitch looks like this:
Choice: Access to an insurance plan that you choose and that will be available if you change jobs, lose your job, or have a pre-existing condition.
• Quality: Health care from professionals who use the best science available to keep you healthy and to treat you if you get sick.
• Affordability: Health care that families can afford and that won't bankrupt the country.
That's 62 words, arranged to call attention to essential aspects of the Obama plan. It is a basic principle of advertising, but it seems to have been disregarded by the people who are working on the president's proposal.
We have been here before. Fifteen years ago, I attended several White House meetings about the Clinton administration's health care reform plan. Each meeting featured a sleep-inducing PowerPoint briefing. I asked one of the experts to give me a few phrases — a "bumper sticker" — I could commit to memory and share with others. No, I was told, the 20-minute version was succinct enough.
Meanwhile, across the Potomac at the Pentagon, my colleagues and I were devising a managed care system for military dependents and retirees. It was a big change, and it produced a lot of anxiety. Our initial efforts to explain it did not go well. The powerful organizations that represent millions of military personnel, family members, and retirees threatened to oppose it. Eventually, we managed to focus the discussion around a few key words. In our case, they were access, quality and choice. Once people could remember what we said, anxieties diminished and the reform — now known as TRICARE — was implemented.
Some very smart people designed the Obama plan, but they have not devised a crisp, compelling way to present it. It is like a music composer who has written the movements to a complicated new symphony but failed to write a memorable refrain.
The president needs a phrase that people can hum on the way home from town meetings. Of course, he must be careful about this because words can have more than one meaning, and collections of words can be turned into acronyms. For example, the phrase "quality, access and cost containment" could be used to describe the administration's goals. But the acronym for that would be pronounced "quack," and that's certainly not what the president wants to convey.
Dorn, a former under secretary of defense, is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.
Copyright 2009 Austin American Statesman
