LITTLE ROCK — Opposition to Obama care tends to have little to do with the actual details. Most people, including most members of Congress, don't know them.
No, opposition as intense as what we've seen comes only from fear; in this case, the fear that, whatever the specifics, Obama care is but the first step toward government takeover of the nation's health care system.
It is the classic "nose of the camel under the tent" phenomenon in which people are reluctant to take even modest steps in a particular direction because it will lead to bigger and more easily taken steps later. The camel slipping its nose under the tent becomes the "crack in the door" becomes the "slippery slope."
At root is distrust of the administration's intentions. People sense that Barack Obama and his liberal supporters want a single-payer health care system similar to that which exists in most European countries and that what they are now proposing is but the first installment.The interesting part is that health care isn't the only public policy issue in which compromise is prevented by fear of the camel's nose.
Abortion has long been the classic example of what we are now witnessing with respect to health care. Most people have reservations of some kind about abortion, but most people probably also want it to remain legal in some form. The mainstream position on abortion closely resembles Bill Clinton's "safe, legal and rare."
The contours of a compromise on abortion have long been visible-legal within the first trimester coupled with parental notification and a ban on public funding and partial-birth procedures where themother's health is not clearly jeopardized. In other words, legal but sharply regulated in such a way as to discourage and express societal disapproval.
That we have yet to settle on such a compromise is largely the fault of prochoice advocates who resist sensible (and popular) restrictions on abortion out of fear that such steps will lead to an eventual overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Pro-choice supporters become absolutists because they fear the ultimate intentions of those on the other side.
The national debate over gun control has long been constrained by similar worst-case assumptions built on distrust. Most Americans support both the right to own firearms and sensible restrictions upon that right. The reason that a middle ground is seldom found stems from fear on the part of gun advocates that what many supporters of gun control want is to ban ownership altogether and that even sensible-sounding proposals represent initial steps toward that goal.
Just about everyone with any understanding of the actuarial implications of entitlement programs agrees that Social Security needs reform. That such reform has proven impossible in recent years flows not only from the dicey politics of it all, but from the refusal of liberal Democrats to accept even the slightest steps toward privatization.
There are few ways to make Social Security sustainable over the long haulwithout some kind of privatization, yet liberals assume that even limited moves in that direction are but the beginning of a broader Republican campaign to dismantle the crown jewel of the New Deal. The end result is a delay of reform that only works to guarantee that the day of reckoning will be more painful and the measures taken at that point to save the program more radical.
The most frustrating thing about all of this is that in most cases the distrust is justified. Obamacare really is designed to eventually create a single-payer, socialized health care system, restrictions on abortion really are intended to create a political climate favorable to a complete ban and most gun control advocates really do just want to get rid of guns. It's also likely that most of those who want to partially privatize Social Security to "save" it aren't exactly fans of the program in the first place.
Compromise is nearly impossible on such issues because the distrust is based on fundamentally irreconcilable positions. Giving an inch raises the fear of giving a mile on the road to calamity. The assumption, actually quite reasonable, is that even minor concessions will only embolden the other side to ask for more.
So how to break such impasses? Perhaps with some kind of grand bargain that links one issue to another. Say conservatives accepting some kind of public option on health care in return for liberals accepting tort reform and partial privatization of Social Security?
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Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 81 on 08/30/2009