Obamacare & statism: On the cutting edge of ignorance

I have grown very weary, in the last few weeks, witnessing the totally irrelevant battle between the left and the right over an admittedly flawed piece of legislation that has, ultimately, little or nothing to do with either health insurance or health care.

It is, in its purest form, an ideological Trojan Horse diverting the public’s limited attention span from the administration’s sole, overriding mission and vision — to replace our culture’s reliance on a value system based on individual choice, with all its inconsistencies, with the ruthless consistency and control of statism.

The arrogance of a handful of ideologues has been not only stunning, but, worse than that, fundamentally unchallenged by political thought leaders and the media. The callousness of coercing 62-year-old single women to have to pay for maternity benefits and pediatric care, as well as accusing 15 million to 30 million people of being so stupid that they didn’t know that they all had “sub-standard” policies written by rapacious insurance companies, is downright frightening.

I haven’t heard that kind of simple-mindedness and condescension, since my undergraduate professor of political science tried to justify and defend Marx’s early writings.

Sadly, this arrogance, on the part of the left, has been well-matched by the idiocy of the right. Not only have they first bored us to tears by replaying Obama’s “misstatements,” ad nauseam, but they have engaged in a guaranteed no-win power struggle over a program that will collapse of its own fiscal irresponsibility and obesity; this latter succeeding in alienating and infuriating millions.

If this weren’t enough, they have missed opportunity after opportunity to present very viable solutions to admittedly flawed health-insurance offerings, put together by numerous think tanks (the Competitive Enterprise Institute, among others). These would have actually insured the uninsured and underinsured, at a pittance of the cost of Obama-care.

So what do we do about the mission of this administration to install statism in America? Well, first we need to understand what it’s about. Its primary goal is to shift people’s identity and allegiance from the individual to the state. And its second goal is to convince people that their problems and struggles can only be resolved by forces and mechanisms that lie outside themselves.

Most people alive today are unaware, for example, that the Nazis conquered and subjugated the Austrians, without firing a shot. They did it by providing a wounded and hurting society with a program of “economic reform,” that gave people “free” health care, education, jobs, etc., and then, slowly but surely, introduced a brutal, horror-show of a regime.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned over the years of working with human systems of all kinds, was that the solution to any given problem, simply created the next set of problems. So, the question we all need to get better at asking, when our society has problems, is — “What kind of problem would our solution create, and is that new problem, even worse than the one we’re trying to solve?”

Solving problems does not take brilliance. It takes the asking of tough questions and the avoidance of ignorance.

Morrie Shechtman, of Kalispell, is chairman of Fifth Wave Leadership and has consulted with hundreds of top executives worldwide about managing in a time of disruptive change and high risk.