What We Talk About When We Talk About Health Care

WASHINGTON POST, 6/24/2009 by Drew Westen (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) - "Universal health care." "The uninsured." "Public option." These are the buzzwords you often hear from Democrats and proponents of President Obama's plan for health-care reform. But if they want to see that plan enacted, they'd do well to excise those phrases from their vocabulary. ∴ Words send messages, but they're not always the messages we intend. Recent polls show overwhelming support for health-care reform, including the "public option" in Obama's plan. But the reality is that which side prevails in this battle will probably depend as much on which one has its messaging right as on which has its policies right. ∴ Republicans and other opponents of Obama's plan are already operating on this assumption, guided by a memo on "the language of health care" that conservative wordsmith Frank Luntz circulated to GOP members on Capitol Hill last month. In it, he conceded that the American public wants real reform and argued that the only way Republicans can defeat Obama's plan is by co-opting the language of reform, describing the president's plan as a "government takeover" and painting it as a bureaucrat's dream and a patient's nightmare. Read more at the Washington Post...