Rhetoric and truth in the Obamacare debate
The WaPo registers a mild complaint about President Obama in the matter of healthcare:
it is disappointing, to say the least, to see Ms. Pelosi and other Democrats revert to round-up-the-usual-suspects demagoguery. President Obama has been more restrained but hardly more accurate; in a news conference last month, he inaccurately complained about insurers making “record profits, right now.”
In fact, among U.S. industries generally and other parts of the health sector in particular, insurers are not particularly profitable. The latest Fortune 500 ranking of most profitable industries has pharmaceuticals third, medical products and equipment fourth, and health insurers down at No. 35. Drugmakers reported a 19.3 percent profit margin; insurers, 2.2 percent.
It doesn’t matter what the facts are. It only matters what sells, and apparently some pollster in Obama’s operation thinks that making the insurance companies the villain is a good approach at the moment. What’s going on with Obama is as old as Plato’s Gorgias dialogue. (See discussion here.)
It’s perfectly obvious that Obamacare leads to a single payer system, and that a majority of Americans do not want that failed healthcare model. Hence, Obama’s strategy to pass it can not be about debate and truth, but must be about poll-tested rhetoric that alternately soothes and frightens in order to persuade. The truth of the matter is beside the point.
August 12th, 2009 at 4:10 am
Excellent observation re: Gorgias and Obama, Dinocrat. Between the Presidency and Congress, the Sophists are clearly running the country. In addition to Plato, Aristotle was also a critic of Gorgias and his Sophists. So… who are today’s Plato and Aristotle? Unfortunately I can think of none.