Health Care Reform in 60 Seconds or Less, or “Was That a Swift Boat I Just Saw Carrying Away Meaningful Reform?”
Filed under: Advertising & Lobbying, Health Care Plans, Proposed Legislation
USA Today has run an interesting article about recent advertising efforts regarding Health Care Reform. USA Today reports that
Business groups opposed to health care bills floated by House and Senate Democrats launched print ads this week. The Republican National Committee ran its own TV ad as well.
Until now, ads for and against President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul have been run by lesser-known groups. Interested groups are stepping up their efforts during Congress’ July Fourth recess.
“It’s probably the starting gun,” says Evan Tracey of Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising.
And so it begins. 30 to 60 second assaults on reason designed: to grab the reins of the angels of our better (or worse) nature (see RNC ad which states: “President Obama talks about a quote, ‘public option.’ When he says public option, that means putting government bureaucrats in charge instead of patients and their doctors. It’s a bad idea.”); to remind Congressman where their bread is buttered (last week “the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ran a full-page ad in Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper,” and “the National Federation of Independent Business ran an ad in The Hill” –see list of health industry contributions to Health Committee Congressman here, page 16); and, last but not least, to protect the interests of those who have paid for the ads.
In short spots, the key is to evoke emotion (fear and anger work well) under the flag of the “informative” (in the RNC ad listen to the gentle voice and piano meant to convey dispassionate, grandfatherly “reasonableness” while stating the conclusory). The trick, of course, is to make the viewer believe that his or her interests and that of the producer of the ad are coextensive– all in 30 to 60 seconds.
Even a cursory glance through the pages of this blog will show a multifarious complexity sometimes difficult to grasp even with hours if not years of study. Very smart people can, and often do, disagree. There is minutiae to contend with and, as always, the devil is in the details.
In an NPR All Things Considered piece about lobbyists we covered in a post the other day, one of the lobbyists, “Sharon Cohen, head of the health-care practice at the Podesta Group, one of Washington’s biggest lobby firms,” made a point well worth noting regarding the legislative process and the importance of details in the form of amendments. NPR spoke with her after she had attended the initial health care overhaul panel of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions:
Cohen later told us that, as she sat in that first health care session, she was listening to the senators position themselves in their opening statements, but “it’s really about the amendments, in terms of how they’re being discussed and the ultimate votes on those amendments.” The committee didn’t get to any amendments that day. The 22 opening statements consumed morning and afternoon sessions.
In the first quarter of this year, the expenditure for health care lobbying reached $1.4 million per day.
Ultimately, the devil is in the details. The Big Print giveth and the small print taketh away. The obscure clauses in the depths of the amendments are as likely as not to make big differences in the reality of reform. The ads we will be seeing most assuredly will not provide details–they will be Big Print–”opening statements”–more likely to obfuscate than educate. They will help provide clatter and cover for the lobbyists to do what they need to do, and help provide justifications for Congressman to vote against their political opponents and in favor of their benefactors (see list of health industry contributions to Health Committee Congressman here, page 16).
The ads may be dumb, but that doesn’t mean they can be ignored. To quote the snake oil ad above: “It is under such conditions that the seeds of disease are sown which bear bitter fruit in the present and future generations. “The danger here is that we will ultimately wind up with “Health Reform” in name only– and it will be another 10 or 20 years until anyone seriously talks about overhaul again. Whether through advertisement or amendment or a combination of both, to be “swift boated” is to lose.
Posts from Health Reform Watch have been cited by media sources throughout the country, including The New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Kaiser Health News, The Health Care Blog, NPR's Planet Money Blog, Duke Univ. Med. Center News, American Health Line Alerts, BusinessWeek.com, Concurring Opinions, Balkinization, The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Las Vegas Sun, Maggie Mahar, Ezra Klein, Tom Geoghegan, and the official homepage of the Office of the Democratic Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, Steny Hoyer.
