It's AMERICAN to disagree AND get along

by Duane N. burghard
©2015


I was unsure of what to write this week ... and then I found myself talking to my wife this morning about a weekend Facebook interaction with one of her brothers. It was during this conversation that she suddenly said, "Stop! Right there. I think you should write down all of that ... everything you just said." So I'm going to do that ... which means that this week's essay is actually little more than an exercise to find out whether or not you agree with my wife.

My very first post on this blog, nine months ago, was about Facebook and the importance of not "unfriending" people we disagree with. Today I'm going to talk a bit about why I think that's so important.

First, a bit of background. The brother-in-law in question is a white male in his late 50s with a high school education. He is a rural homebuilder (and a very good one) by trade and, not surprisingly (given the data I've already given you), he is politically very conservative. The discussion in question centered on the Affordable Care Act (aka the ACA, or frankly least accurately aka "Obamacare"). My wife had posted a meme correctly noting that calling the ACA "Obamacare" is a bit of a misnomer and her brother took the opportunity to express his profound dissatisfaction with it.

Not liking the ACA is fine (for the record I have some serious issues with it myself), but, as with all things, while I don't mind people liking or disliking things and saying so on Facebook (as I have noted many times, it is still a (mostly) free country), it is important to me that people like or dislike things for intelligent, logical and most importantly accurate reasons ... and that is where I often reach the point where I feel compelled to hit the "Reply" button.

My brother-in-law started by noting that "it's Americans that hate Obamacare." This is empirically untrue, and so I found a variety of empirical references from conservative news sources (which I hoped he would react better to) like Fox News and Bloomberg pointing out this factual error and noting various apolitical, unbiased poll results demonstrating the popularity of the program. I also noted the report last week in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), hardly a liberal group themselves, noting the significant success of the ACA as a program.

For the record, here is the exact quote from the JAMA article:

"The ACA’s first 2 open enrollment periods were associated with significantly improved trends in self-reported coverage, access to primary care and medications, affordability, and health. Low-income adults in states that expanded Medicaid reported significant gains in insurance coverage and access compared with adults in states that did not expand Medicaid."

Finally, I again noted (as I frequently do) that I find it odd that so many Republicans have such a vehement opposition to the Affordable Care Act, and the reason I find it odd is because, of course, it was originally their plan! If you look into the legislative history of the Affordable Care Act, you will find it's origins come from a group of Senate Republicans. It was their compromise solution on health care and, at one point, it had the support of the clear majority of Republican Senators in the United States Senate. I have LONG thought that the Republican's opposition to a program that continues to get more and more successful and popular as time goes on is ludicrous. In my opinion, a FAR smarter approach would be to do a 180 degree flip, tout it as a rousing success and remind the American people at every opportunity that it was the Republicans who were responsible for it. Not only would this be the politically smarter course (in my opinion) it would have the side benefit of being historically accurate. Instead, they have responded with efforts to demonize it, repeal it and label it socialism (which is just beyond stupid to me every time I hear it ... how anyone could look at a private insurance marketplace and label it socialism indicates a level of ignorance that just scares the beejeebies out of me).

Note that at no point so far am I trying to get him (or you) to like or dislike the ACA, I'm simply pointing out that saying that Americans hate it is inaccurate. But it's his response to my references and then my response to him again that really gets to the heart of why it is so important to have conversations like this one.

In his next response, he noted to me that he didn't need to get his information from a poll, he knew everyone hated it from personal experience. He then took the opportunity to compare it to Social Security (which he incorrectly referred to as an entitlement program ... Social Security is, of course, most emphatically NOT an entitlement program) and to express concerns about the costs (which is, I think, actually a very legitimate concern and criticism of the ACA, and one I actually share).

I responded to each of these points. I have always been deeply troubled by what I see as an over-reliance on anecdotal "personal experience," especially when reliable, much larger scale data exists to inform or educate us. I am certain, for example, that we all know people who don't like the ACA (and it's certainly logical that he would know more of those people than I would), but the whole point of having empirical polling data from apolitical, unbiased sources is so that we can go beyond what we know from just our own first world experience and have a better, clearer and more accurate view of the world as it actually is (especially when that differs from what we think it is). I also clearly explained what Social Security is and how it is most emphatically NOT an entitlement program and has nothing to do with our budget deficit (other than the government raiding its trust fund so that it can pay cheaper rates on its borrowing). My point in this response was to emphasize that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts, and we have to start from a factual basis before we can make the progress needed to have a more valuable discussion.

(By the way, I also noted that we shared a significant concern about the issue of health care costs and that this concern was the key reason that I and other Democrats resisted supporting the ACA initially. Many Democrats who voted for the ACA "held their noses" in doing so and only voted for it because it, like so many other things in our nation's history, was a compromise.)

Now I know that, at this point, many of my readers are thinking, "jeez Duane, why are you even bothering with this?" Well, I'll tell you: because it's IMPORTANT. In fact, I believe that having and participating in discussions exactly like this is critical to the future of our country. The United States of America is a Republic, and our Republic was quite literally designed and built for the specific purpose of creating a sustainable way for people of good conscience who have differing viewpoints to coexist as efficiently, effectively and harmoniously as possible. This is what democratic Republics do! And they do this through compromise. Our nation's entire history is literally riddled with compromises. The Constitution, our nation's most important founding document, contains a whole series of compromises. The goal of our government has always been to create a framework that allows for people with different views of the same issue to craft a "least worst" solution that often ends up making everyone a little unhappy but is also something that everyone can live with. And we agree to these compromise solutions so that we can continue to live and work together. Anyone who doesn't agree that this is IMPORTANT work, anyone who thinks in "my way (or my side's way) or the highway" absolutes is, in my opinion, fundamentally UN-American. This is a VERY big problem in our society today, something I strongly blame on the gerrymandering of Congressional districts (when you're a Congressman in a district that is drawn to protect you (as a Democrat or a Republican), you literally have a disincentive to compromise and an incentive to become increasingly polarized ... that's a BIG problem in a society that requires compromise to work properly).

The point is that my conversation with my brother-in-law is really just a microcosmic example of trying to make our Republic work. It is a conversation between people of good conscience who disagree (although I'm not entirely sure that we do actually disagree as we haven't yet uncovered the legitimate, fact based reason for his opposition to the ACA ... but I certainly accept that there may be one), and if we simply "agree to disagree" and walk away, well that might work for the two of us in this one instance, but as a society it's NOT working and isn't going to work for us in the long run. We have to find ways to get along and reach the compromises necessary for the core functions of our government to operate.

Compromises are everywhere in our society. Don't want to participate in the ACA? That's OK, you don't have to, but then you have to pay a special tax. That's a compromise. You don't want to vaccinate your children? That's OK, you don't have to, but then they can't come to public school. That's a compromise (individual liberty vs pubic health). You want two houses of Congress? OK, compromise (known in fact as the "Great" Compromise).

If it's not clear why compromise is so important yet, here's a disturbing bottom line to all of my conservative and liberal friends: the people who often strongly disagree with you are NOT going away. There are a LOT of them, and to dismiss them and call them names and worst of all ignore them will only make our situation worse.

In the case of the ACA, yes, I have to say that I'm a little miffed by the visceral animosity that so many of my conservative friends have towards it ... because it was their idea! President Obama only selected it as the legislative solution to advocate because it was the compromise he found that could get the votes to pass. But if you want to compromise the compromise, OK, that's literally why government exists (most of the laws passed by Congress are actually modifications to existing laws!). But we (and that means our politicians, but it also means US) have to be aware of the fact that there are other people who are not, by definition, evil who don't want what we want ... so in order to coexist, each of us is going to have to give up some of what we want. That's not a weakness, that is quite literally our STRENGTH.