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“What’s in a Big Mac?”

By: Flagstaff (Diary)  |  March 23rd, 2010 at 01:06 PM  | 

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Free advice abounds on the internet.  I’ve spread plenty of my own around, here and elsewhere, but some free advice is more valuable than other free advice.  Some of the most valuable comes from the keyboard of Bill Whittle, contributor to Pajamas Media and PJTV.  Even when he’s simply riffing, he’s better than most–sort of like a serious Dennis Miller, and about as funny.  When he gets down to it, he’s positively riveting.

Yesterday he posted his thoughts at PajamasMedia.com about Health Care Deformation, what will come of it, and how we should apply ourselves.  Although this particular column isn’t an example of his very best writing, it is timely and worth bringing to your attention.  A central point was that a lesson we should have learned from HCD was that of message discipline.

What is message discipline? I’ll give you an example:

What’s in a Big Mac?  Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun! That’s what’s in a Big Mac. We have got to understand that saying NO! to this socialism is admirable and essential, but that from now on there has to be a counter-narrative to what these Marxists are selling, because like it or not the human brain is wired for stories — that’s how we learn (and why the real fight is not for Washington but rather Hollywood — but that’s a story for another time.)

If we want to win on health care, or any other issue, we need to have an answer to what they are selling and that answer needs to be as simple and comprehensive as the Big Mac slogan.

Our position on health care?  Two tax incentives, health accounts, crossing state lines, tort reform, competition on an auto insurance bun. And if we don’t learn how to do this we will lose.

Erick Erickson has a shorter but similar message at Repeal and Start Over.

So let’s put the two together.  Repeal and Replace! Tax incentives, health savings accounts, crossing state lines, tort reform, and auto insurance-style competition.

That’s a slogan (perhaps still a bit too long) that we can wield pretty effectively in the debates to come.

COMMENTS

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  • http://stixblog.com Black River Wolf

    Skye over at Midnight Blue has the same idea

    Repeal. Replace. Reform.
    http://midnightbluesays.com/2010/03/repeal-replace-reform.html

    • http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

      http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/7281166/

      If you trust his story, which I have no reason not to, this guy has real problems. The main problem seems to be that he uses super expensive care providers who charge him full hospital emergency room fees, do not give him discounts, and do not help him by steering him toward more reasonably priced providers. As a result, he is deep in debt he will never escape except by going to bankruptcy court. Does he qualify for Medicaid? I don’t know. Does he have off-the-book earnings? I don’t know. But the story is a powerful one and we have to have a coherent story of how he gets out of this with our plans.

  • romatrast

    Our dear republic keeps drifting toward socialism because socialism gives people stuff and we have only ideas.

    Whittle’s blurb is great but perhaps even better would be “the Free Market can do it better, faster, cheaper, and with a lot fewer forms to fill out and manuals to read.”

    But the ordinary citizen, who is devoutly disinterested in politics and slogans, will ask, “Then why haven’t you?” “Well we did,” we’d reply. “Don’t you remember that 85% of us said we were happy with our current insurance before this all got started? 85% is as close to unanimous as it gets in a democracy, for goodness sake!”

    It’s a tough sell. Mostly due to federal and state government regulations to be sure, but very hard to explain to anyone who isn’t a an accountant, a lawyer, and a systems analyst all rolled into one.

    “We’ll get somebody else to pay for your health insurance,” is hard to beat.

    • Flagstaff

      a lot of effort. And if they’d just said that up front, think of the time they’d have saved.

      ?We?ll get somebody else to pay for your health insurance.?

      That sort of what they say about everything, isn’t it.

    • Flagstaff

      in a USA with 30% of the populace somewhere in Bozonian space.

      An essentail part of our answer to the Libs should be the fact that “85% have said they like what they have, they’d just like to see things change for other people. What does that mean?”

      Among other things, of course, it means that they think they know their neighbors’ business better than their neighbors do. And they’d like to see HC insurance made more affordable for the people who can’t afford it now.

      If such a situation actually exists. Isn’t that what Medicaid is supposed to cover, only we take out the middle man and eliminate the insurance part? By virtue of ObamaCare, we’ve now made Medicaid too expensive for the states to support. So how can the Feds do better given the enormous bureaucracy they’ll have to install to mismanage it?