Ideology Indispensable for Health Care Reform
By Jason Sagall
February 22, 2010
President Obama will most likely use his upcoming health care summit on February 25 to admonish Congress to check their ideologies at the door, narrow their approach and compromise. The summit may signal a new low in the intellectual integrity of our leadership.
The president will likely reiterate his disdain for being called an ideologue and in the same breath reciprocate the same ad hominem sentiment. He will probably implore everyone to just get along and not let ideology get in the way of action.
"Ideologue" and "ideology" are popular pejoratives in the fight over health care reform. Members of both parties say the main obstacle to reform is, simply, ideology — not a particular ideology, such as socialism or capitalism, but the "clinging" to ideology as such.
These vilifiers of ideology throw out the baby with the bathwater. They fail to differentiate between a set of broad, thought-out, logically connected principles serving as the fundamental base of a political or other system — and mindless dogmatism. In fact, for the latter they need only to look in a mirror.
When President Obama was directly asked to state his ideology, he replied, in typical fashion for big-government politicians and professional progressives, it is "pragmatism."
Touted as a practical doctrine that nobly restricts itself to empirical facts (which it has no means of evaluating), pragmatism is the oxymoron of choice for many on the Right and Left. It is the ideology to end ideologies. It is the calling card of those with a hidden agenda, and it should be regarded as the transparent evasion that it is.
Pragmatism does not merely give precedence to immediate symptoms over root causes: it disregards that distinction. In dealing with a dehydrated tree that has dying branches, for instance, a pragmatist would cut leaves from healthy branches and painstakingly try to graft them onto the less healthy ones. If he were given the suggestion to water the soil, he would exclaim, "Don't bother me with rigid ideology on plant growth. I'm dealing with a crisis here."
Married to their myopic methods, pragmatists insist on focusing narrowly and have an aversion to discussing underlying causes of existing conditions. Observe that pragmatist politicians refuse to entertain a principled debate to examine whether or not a truly unregulated industry would lead to better and more affordable health care and insurance, or whether or not the expanding regulatory and redistributive elements of America's mixed economy led to the current state of bureaucratic waste and rising costs. Instead, the debate is over which proposed mandate will most fastidiously address the most glaring symptoms of an individual's or group's "need" — with competing special interests being the real driving factor.
It is no wonder that the sprawling legislation proposed by the House and Senate is tortuous beyond comprehension.
Principled, ideological discourse might awaken the original, non-contradictory definition of rights as opposed to the current proliferation of rights-violating entitlements and the redistribution of income. It might speak to a separation of government and economics and whether to, not how to, control the health care industry, as opposed to the current presumption of the paternalistic necessity of government intervention.
It is no wonder why bureaucrats who parasite off the public would like ideology to be a dirty word: it might shed some light on the essence of "change" versus the status quo, and expose what each would really look like and who wants which.
The only cure to the health care crisis is ideological: the principled reform — i.e., the rejection, not ramping up — of government's current impractical modus operandi of tax, redistribute and regulate, in favor of the transforming constitutional principles of limited government, individualism and freedom of choice.
Jason Sagall is a writer for Americans for Free Choice in Medicine.
Copyright © 2010 Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. All rights reserved.
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