I was pretty excited to get to reading the House's plan for health care this morning, as well as various liberal thinkers' responses to it. I got so wrapped up in thinking about the serious policy discussion, I forgot about Republicans. (Surprising as it may be to Americans, Republicans haven't gone extinct. I've heard if you listen closely enough at night, you can still hear the eerie screech of Lindsay Graham as he moralizes, and, more rarely, the sound of John McCain being crushed by the weight of the massive ennui he carries on his shoulders.)
But I reminded of them with this in my inbox telling me to embed it in my blog, saying it was from "Areg Bagdasarian, Business Development Team, Docstoc.com." Well, if you click on it, it takes you right to... John Boehner's Congressional site.
Obviously, the tack they're planning to take is that the bill is too complicated. You know, I suggested the House Democrats decorate their health care plan with puppies, wicked car crashes, hot chicks, and boi pics (for the Senate Republicans) in order to get people to read through the whole thing, but they wouldn't listen! Something about wanting to discuss serious policy issues....
Anyway, this all goes to explain why the Republicans' plan's sparseness. When the only factor worth judging legislation by is its complexity in flow chart form, this is what you end up with:
So, the feeling I'm left with: Is this still the mid-90's? I think that people are actually much better at handing mathematical complexity nowadays, and are a lot less trusting of the sort of know-nothingist pride-in-stupidity that makes arguments like "the Democrats' plan is just too complicated" work.
Additionally, if someone were to make a flow chart of what some people have had to go through in order to get a private health care plan to pay for a covered treatment, something tells me it would actually look complex as well. And more and more Americans, as the medical loss ratio for major insurers has dropped to 80%, have experienced that complexity all too closely.
But I suppose the question isn't whether it'll work or not to convince the American people. It's a talking point, and people who are already opposed to health care reform are all too willing to believe it. Personally, I think that there's just too much desire for substantial health care reform in this country for it to be stopped by populist appeals (big money donations, on the other hand...).
What is interesting is how the quality of the flow chart, in terms of just technical skill, improved drastically from when Republicans were proposing their own plan to when they were attacking the Democrats'. As if we needed any more proof that conservatism isn't an ideology that can govern, only obstruct.
As for Mr. Areg Bagdasarian, I replied to his email:
Your Republican propaganda made my browser crash! That's some harsh
criticism from Google Chrome!
~Alex
But the greatest thing about Chrome is that only one tab crashes and the rest keep on going. Oh, yeah, someone was preparing for just this occasion.