Wisconsin: teaching us why negative is better than positive

[eridani]

What I am referring to here is the universal human tendency to react far more strongly to having something taken away from us than to the prospect of gaining something that might be good in the future. Repukes are not shy about using this to advance their agenda, and it's time for progressives to use successful winning strategies for our own agenda.

The labor movement has been working incessantly for years to get its membership to lobby for the Employee Free Choice Act, to not much avail. What happened in Wisconsin was that massive mumbers of people turned out (many of whom had not been active on anything for years) to protest workers being stripped of what they already had, and had taken for granted. This presents labor with a golden opportunity--a strong defense that takes the next step and uses popular energy to run this back for a touchdown, which would be getting the EFCA passed, among many other things.

I'm writing this right now because I am having a hell of a time convinsing single payer activist organizations that defending Medicare as is needs to be our top priority because of the rage it will generate if it is taken away from people. Unfortunately what I am hearing is a lot of policy wonkery about how Medicare is in trouble because of the medical inflation affecting the entire system, we need to keep educating more people about this and how single payer will solve it, yadayadayada. It's all true--but it is also completely insane to pass up a current opportunity to use popular rage against the possibility of having something taken away in order to move a more positive agenda forward.

How can we get lefties to quit being so goddam noble?

[dkf]

1. We should be advocating single payer because Medicare is set up to fail.

That is what we need to be telling people.

[eridani]

2. Less wonkery and more working with human psychology, please n/t

[dkf]

4. The psychology should be that Democrats are the only ones who can make health care work.

Because we are more interested in saving lives than in producing profits.

We need to realize that Govt should fund medical research so we don't need a profit motive to produce breakthrough drugs.

We also need to look for cures instead of bandaids that keep us needing more and more care.

[leftstreet]

3. If Medicare is "set up to fail," wouldn't the same be true of Medicare For All?

:shrug:

[Scuba]

5. No. What's wrong is that we've got a splintered system driven largely by profit motive. n/t

[leftstreet]

7. Medicare is not a for-profit system. It should be copied, not abandoned n/t

[Scuba]

8. We should have Medicare for All.....

...profit motive has no place in the health coverage arena.

[dkf]

9. No.

If everyone is in the same system including all the delivery systems of health care it would work more like a utility in terms of cost. People would be given the ability to make a limited profit, not hiking expenses for sick and dying people as high as they could tolerate.

[SheilaT]

6. I thought Medicare IS a single payer system.

At least that's the way it is for the hospital I work in.

And I thought part of what at least some of us were advocating during the entire health care debate was Medicare for all.

So those who want to eliminate Medicare and replace it with a single payer system are quite confused.