Posted by
Buster Foghorn on Monday, September 07, 2009 1:24:56 PM
What should President Obama say this week to a joint session of Congress about health care reform? Should he repeat another version of his previous “111 health care speeches, interviews, and press conferences in which he’s talked about health care?”Should he send Hillary to Russia to get back the “reset” button? Should he try something else?
Judging by remarks from commentators, if President Obama doesn’t try something else, his message on health care reform won’t persuade. Mark Steyn in The Omnipresent Leader criticizes President Obama: “the more he opens his mouth the more the American people recoil from his ‘reforms.’” And in Obama the Mortal, Charles Krauthammer observes the President’s decline: “The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic.” And Peggy Noonan in Coruscating on Thin Ice declares Mr. Obama has lost the trust of the center: “But the great mass of Americans, the big center, will, I strongly suspect, not be listening. Mr. Obama has grown boring. And it's not Solid Boring, which is fine in a president and may be good. It's sort of Faux Eloquent Boring, especially on health care.” Eventually, everyone on board —even movie goers at this White House—knew the Titanic was going down. President Obama cannot afford to do more of the same—he must try something else—when he speaks to Congress.
How could the President change course—turn the ship of state—and fundamentally reset his health care reform goals? One way is to take some basic assumptions and reverse them. In his books, Cracking Creativity and Thinkertoys, creativity expert, Michael Michalko explains that by reversing assumptions you broaden your thinking, you change perspective, you often see answers to problems that were not obvious before.
When Alfred Sloan took over General Motors on the verge of bankruptcy, he reversed some assumptions. At that time, Michalko says the assumption was that “you had to buy a car before you drove it.” But by reversing the assumption “to mean you could buy it while driving it,” Sloan pioneered the concept of installment buying for car dealers. Michalko notes, “Many creative thinkers get their most original ideas when they challenge and reverse the obvious.”
Two of the key assumptions President Obama has been clinging to during his health care reform campaign are that reform needs to be comprehensive and that it can be paid for by taking money from Medicare.
But does health care reform need to be comprehensive? Why can’t the White House reverse the assumption? Why can’t Mr. Obama pursue a series of actions? Why can’t he achieve closure through a series of small wins, building a coalition as he goes along, gaining the confidence of the opposition, enhancing his power to persuade? Why not begin with issues like portability of insurance or an authorization permitting the purchase of medical insurance nationwide, issues where he should be able to get a majority of Republicans to join him?
Part of the “power to persuade” is as old as Aristotle; it is the ethos of the speaker. The President’s poll numbers more likely reflect that the President has lost the public trust than that the public doesn’t understand the health care plan. Health care is too important to have a two-tier discriminatory system. The elderly should be cherished as national assets, not given a “blue pill” and told to take one for the Gipper! Reverse the assumptions: America can spend more and we can keep our promise to provide quality health care to the elderly—does anyone really believe the cash for clunkers program is a better expenditure of taxpayer funds than 5 more years for granny?