Elusive Trope's picture

    Real Health Care Reform's Biggest Challenge: the 75%ers

    ABC News/Washington Post poll draws this conclusion:

    One key challenge is that while Americans are broadly dissatisfied with the system overall, vastly more – 75 percent – rate their own quality of care favorably. The difficulty thus remains where it’s been all along: Forging solutions to the current system’s problems that don’t leave people fearing they’ll lose what many see as their own good quality of care now.

    When people are generally ok with what they have personally, it is immensely more difficult to get them to hit the streets to demand changes.  Moreover, it is easy for those seeking to maintain the status quo to spark fear in these people that this or that reform will undermine what they already have.  And further more, it is unlikely that any increase costs they will incur to make the system better will result in any tangible benefits to them directly. 

    The end result is when the national debate around health care heats up, they usually feel ambivalence about whatever it brought to the table.  Ambivalence is not the feeling that fuels passionate reform movements. 

    Any discussion about what to do next has to take these 75%ers into account.  More specifically, what strategy is going to be implemented to light the fire under them to just pick up the phone and call their representatives in support of this or in opposition to that.

    Comments

    Whether personally or as employees, people who already have insurance are passably familiar with how it is currently marketed and the remainder are too or soon will be.  If supporters of AFA spent just 1% of the time, money and pixels they spent agonizing over SCOTUS, they should be able to come up with a decent marketing campaign to allay consumer fears.

     


    True.  But for every dollar spent and pixel created in support of allaying consumer fears, ten dollars and pixels will be generated by the opponents to real reform.  Which if it isn't really an issue, than Citizens United decision shouldn't be anything we need to fret over.


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