The health care bill and the Supreme Court decision

The Supreme Court has spoken, but nothing has really been resolved. The Court’s extremely grudging decision gave ammunition to both sides of the debate and did nothing to unite them. The Republicans intend to repeal the health care act, and the Democrats plan to forge ahead. Both sides talk righteous talk.

The thing that stands out for anyone who reads the reactions on both sides is how little they understand each other. To liberals, it seems completely obvious that health care is a collective problem and can only be solved by collective action, creating a common pool and applying the best scientific knowledge to achieve optimal results for all. To conservatives, it seems equally obvious that health care is too personal and too complex for government solutions, and that a collective program will inevitably trample on deep private values. But neither gets the other’s arguments at all, or even tries.

No solution to the health care crisis is possible unless we work together, but these events are making things much worse. They are causing everyone to dig into entrenched positions, deepening the crisis of mistrust which the President so eloquently described in his inaugural address. As a nation, we cannot afford that; it’s even worse than a bad health care system.

Liberals do not understand how deeply a large part of the country feels that this law has been rammed down their throats, like a whole series of actions over the last fifty-plus years. The resisters feel that government has intruded into the most personal aspects of their lives: the relation between men and women, relations among friends and neighbors, religious beliefs, sexual identities. This law feels like a further invasion into the most intimate realms.

The reaction, to be sure, has often been irresponsible. The warnings about “death panels,” for example, badly misrepresent the actual law. Liberals generally blame these distortions on self-interested partisanship, fear, and ignorance. But such dismissiveness misses the point: misinformation may fan the flames, but the fuel of conservative reaction is a feeling on the part of many people of having been violated.

Conservatives, for their part, do the country no favors by claiming that Obama and the liberals are out to destroy the nation. They are in effect calling a large part of the country evil. They want to impose their own version of good and right. They refuse to recognize that liberals, in passing this law, are doing their best to “promote the general welfare “ -- a purpose defined by the Constitution. Thus conservatives, especially the Republican party, are contributing to the dangerous tendency across the society to withdraw into conformist clans and to shut out others.

So whoever wins this battle -- or even if no one wins, which is the most likely scenario -- the damage is profound. We are locked in a vicious spiral of mistrust, and no one is really trying to break it.

The way out has to begin with much more sustained attention to understanding. There’s an old technique in dispute resolution: have the parties read each others’ viewpoints back to each other. If liberals and conservatives tried seriously to do that, it would help. It wouldn’t create agreement or eliminate differences of belief, but it would reduce the demonization and defensive distortions that have so marred this process. We have a lot of other urgent problems on our plate, from economic fragility to climate change; we have to understand each other better, as a basis for working together.