“It is not clear how fully the public understands the complexities of the government …proposal…”
— NY Times, June 20, 2009, “In Poll, Wide Support for Government Run Health”
“The People are that part of the State that does not know what it wants.”
— Hegel
The health care debate has become bitter and explosive because the Obama administration is actually on the verge of accomplishing something significant. We can tell this from the way its opponents are now pulling out all the stops. The problem with our national debate on this issue, as with so many other issues, is that it inevitably devolves into a nonsensical partisan howling. As soon as an important public issue becomes politicized, our partisans draw a line in the sand and force the rest of us to choose sides. Liberals and conservatives duly line up on opposed sides of this line, but without any clear understanding of the issues. No one knows what they’re talking about, but they argue anyway, and get rather heated up. This is a powerful example of “political irrationality” – a concept in political psychology which posits that most people are irrevocably biased in their political perceptions (see the essays under the "Political Irrationality" category on this blog). In a recent book, The Opinion Makers, David Moore shows that most of the large polls routinely exaggerate public knowledge on complex policy issues. The truth is, almost no one has the facts straight. Our politicians are no help here because they adopt absurdly unrealistic partisan positions – Conservatives pretend we don’t need health care reform, when it’s obvious that we do, and Liberals pretend that they know how much it’s going to cost, when it’s obvious that they don’t. The problem with Town Hall meetings to discuss public issues, as with many other devices in our democratic arsenal, is that they are not deliberative. No one is forced to learn anything before talking, no one is forced to reflect, no one is ever held accountable for any vote they cast. Under such conditions, people resort to reflexive partisan programming and end up hurling slogans at each other. I call this "political debate via screaming." The process is worse than a waste or time, it’s terribly counter-productive, spawning hatred and mis-information. Consequently, we should just admit that Town Hall meetings are a publicity stunt; sometimes the stunt favors one side, sometimes the other side, but it’s no place to learn the facts. Scholars James Fishkin and Ned Crosby have proposed a much better alternative – citizen panels or juries in which ordinary citizens are exposed to information and discussion periods before being polled (see for example: http://cdd.stanford.edu/polls/docs/summary/ ). Prof. Fishkin has developed a methodology known as the “Deliberative Poll” which would be perfect for a discussion of health care reform. In a Deliberative Poll, a large sample of ordinary citizens is polled on their opinions about a given public issue. Then, they are exposed to two or three days of meetings, lecture, debates and briefings on the topic. They not only get a chance to interrogate experts, they get a chance to debate their fellow citizens. At the end of the process, the participants vote again. The second vote reveals what I call “the arrow of reason” – it indicates which way reasonable people have been moved by the evidence. That should be enormously convincing. I would strongly recommend that the Obama administration consult with Fishkin or a similar scholar to develop a national deliberative poll or citizen jury on the final health care proposals. There would be no more reliable barometer of true public opinion than a sample of ordinary Americans asked to invest a few days in really learning the facts.
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