The Wonk Room

The New Luntz Memo Is The Same As The Old Luntz Memo

GOP wordsmith Frank Luntz has penned another self-aggrandizing memo advising Republicans how to talk about health care reform. The new memo is the same as the old memo: admit the health care system is in crisis but remind Americans that the Democratic proposals would lead to a government-takeover of health care. “Suggestion: So far, most of the ads featuring concerned patients have been women. It’s time to include men in these ads, too. Treatment of prostate cancer can be delayed just as much as for breast cancer when the government takes over care – and American men deserve to know about that,” he writes.

Luntz points to poll numbers that demonstrate unease with the Democrats’ proposals:

Public anger is REAL (note to certain media outlets & bloggers who will eventually savage this memo: the town hall phenomenon is NOT manufactured). A majority of Americans (55%) agree that “When it comes to the healthcare reform debate in Washington, I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.” Only 26% disagree (leaving 19%). Nearly one in five Americans strongly agree.

But it’s not that Americans are scared of exchanges, subsidies, insurance regulations or the public plan. They’re frightened by the alleged death panels, rationing and the government interference. They’re frightened by Luntz, not Obama.

Since the election, Republicans have tapped into a paranoid corner of the American electorate that sees the President as a communist intent on redistributing the wealth and outsourcing our national defense to Bill Ayers. Now, the party hopes to convince Americans that Obama will turn over the health care system to Dr. Kevorkian. That strategy lost the election and it will fail to stop health care reform.

Hatch Peddles Luntz Talking Points, Misrepresents Kennedy’s Health Bill

During an interview with Fox News this morning, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) criticized the draft version of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) health care bill as a “one-size fits all government mandated health care plan.”

Hatch repeated the Frank Luntz-inspired charge that a government plan would place a bureaucrat between “you and your doctor” at least four times during the segment. And he wildly misrepresented the HELP bill while pressing Democrats in Congress to track a bipartisan path towards passing health reform. Watch it:

Hatch joins a long line of conservative lawmakers who rely on poll-tested Republican talking points that are intended to stall reform rather than fix the system.

For instance, contrary to Hatch’s insistence that the bill would put a bureaucrat “between you and your doctor,” Section 2 of the draft legislation explicitly states that “a strong doctor-patient relationship is essential to the practice of medicine, and patients have a right to an effective doctor patient relationship”:

Moreover, Hatch argues that a public health care plan would “crowd out” private coverage and cites a Lewin Group study which found that 119.1 million Americans (Hatch actually rounds the number up to 120) would leave private health insurance if the public plan used Medicare payments and was opened to all employers. The draft of the HELP bill, however, specifies that the public plan would reimburse providers at 10 percent above Medicare rates and most Democratic proposals — including the President’s campaign health care plan — would likely allow only small businesses and individuals to buy-into the public plan. Under such a design, far fewer Americans “would leave private health insurance.”

All this suggests that Hatch is overstating his willingness to work with Democrats in a “bipartisan” fashion. After all, the first step towards compromise is truthfully characterizing legislation.

Frank Luntz: It Doesn’t Matter What Obama’s Health Care Plan Says, We’ll Still Call It ‘Government Takeover’

In an interview with the New York Times, GOP wordsmith Frank Luntz — who recently penned a health care messaging memo instructing Republicans to attack President Obama’s health reform efforts by criticizing the deficiencies in foreign health care systems — concedes that Republicans will label Obama’s reform effort a “government takeover” of health care, regardless of the actual proposal:

Is it a correct description of the president’s plans for reform?
We don’t know what he is proposing. We want to avoid “a Washington takeover.”

But that’s not at issue. What the Democrats want is for everyone to be able to choose between their old, private health-insurance plan and an all-new, public health-insurance option.
I’m not a policy person. I’m a language person.

Indeed, “rather than challenging the tenets of American reform proposals, Luntz establishes a straw man argument against a non-existent health plan.” As Democratic strategist Paul Begala observes in a recent retort to the Luntz memo, “Because they know they cannot win the argument honestly, Republicans are resorting to mendacity.”

Begala Memo Makes Case For Defining Progressive Health Proposals

Paul Begala has released a point-by-point debunk of Frank Luntz’s now infamous health care memo, in which the GOP wordsmith instructed Republicans to attack the president’s health reform efforts by criticizing the deficiencies in foreign health care systems.

The top quote is key: “The only people who give any credence to Republican Senators’ rhetoric is Democratic Senators,” Begala quotes George Mitchell as saying. In other words, the public agrees with progressive health care priorities and in this health care debate, Americans start out on our side. Begala:

That fact is this: the overwhelming majority of American support health care reform. In fact, Dr. Luntz himself notes that voters trust Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 20 percent on health care . If health care reform were unpopular, Republicans would not resort to misleading rhetoric to mask their opposition. The striking thing about Luntz’s memo is how the rhetoric he advocates apes our message.

So the problem is not in convincing the American people that we need reform; they’ve heard that message before and they overwhelmingly agree with it. The real goal, this time, is to do a better job in mobilizing that public support into action for change. As Chris Jennings often argues, “when it comes to health reform, fear beats hope. In the past, this has meant that nothing gets done.”

Progressives need to answer conservative attacks by defending progressive proposals on their merits — as Begala does– rather than resorting to the comfortable/familiar rhetoric of “affordable health care for all” or “shared responsibility.” Such buzz language has doomed past reform efforts. As Haynes Johnson and David Broder argue in their analysis of President Clinton’s failed health care reform effort, by relying on hollow buzz words, rather than policy specifics, the Clintons allowed the opposition to ascribe meaning to reform rhetoric. Let’s hope we doesn’t make that same mistake again.

If Frank Luntz’s Memo Were A Bill

In an effort to have something to talk about over the Memorial Day recess, so-called Republican party moderates Reps. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Charlie Dent (R-PA) have unveiled legislation protecting Americans from the deficiencies of foreign health care systems:

By enacting the Medical Rights Act, Congress will ensure Americans keep the choice, quality and access currently denied citizens of the U.K. and Canada (Canadian law actually bans patients from paying for care themselves, even if denied care).

This is the consequence of taking Frank Luntz’s memo too seriously. Luntz uses straw-man arguments against British and Canadian health care to attack the Democrats’ proposal and Kirk and Dent are targeting their legislation against a non-existent proposal. Consider some of this language:

- In addition, this section prevents the federal government from regulating the hiring practices of organizations that provide health care, such as hospitals, clinics, and the like.

- This section prohibits the federal government from regulating privately supported medicine, legally protecting the doctor-patient relationship against federal controls or rationing for care not paid for by the federal government.

- This section also protects the rights of patients to buy health insurance, or make any other arrangements to pay for their own health care.

Luntz writes that “it’s not enough to just say what you’re against. You have to tell them what you’re for.” If your only goal is to stay ‘on message’ and to convince your constituents that you are in fact an advocate of (or against) something (even if that something isn’t real), then this is what you produce. Of course, if your constituents are literate they’ll just laugh at you.

Deconstructing Frank Luntz’s Obstructionist Health Care Reform Memo

GOP wordsmith Frank Luntz has authored a new messaging memo defining the Republican rhetoric on health care reform (READ FULL MEMO HERE). The memo is titled “The Language of Health Care 2009″ and it lays out the argument for “stopping the Washington takeover” of health care.” But if fully implemented it may very well stop health care reform:

This document is based on polling results and Instant Response dial sessions conducted in April 2009. It captures not just what Americans want to see but exactly what they want to hear. The Words That Work boxes that follow are already being used by a few Congressional and Senatorial Republicans. From today forward, they should be used by everyone.

Luntz warns that “if the dynamic becomes ‘President Obama is on the side of reform and Republicans are against it,’ then the battle is lost and every word in this document is useless.’” The trouble is, it already is useless. Because rather than challenging the tenets of American reform proposals, Luntz establishes a straw man argument against a non-existent health plan.

Buried amongst the usual rhetoric about government-run health care is Luntz’s predictable contradiction: he instructs Republicans to “be vocally and passionately on the side of REFORM” but then urges GOP lawmakers to misrepresent and obstruct any real chance of passing comprehensive legislation.

“Humanize your approach,” but argue that health care reform “will result in delayed and potentially even denied treatment, procedures and/or medications.” “Acknowledge the crisis” but ask your constituents “would you rather… ‘pay the costs you pay today for the quality of care you currently receive,’ OR ‘Pay less for your care, but potentially have to wait weeks for tests and months for treatments you need.”

In other words, say there is a crisis but then argue that health care reform would lead to “the government setting standards of care,” government “rationing care,” and would “put the Washington bureaucrats in charge of health care.” “This plays into more favorable Republican territory by protecting individual care while downplays the need for a comprehensive national plan,” the memo states.

Readers are also instructed to conflate Obama’s fairly moderate hybrid approach to reform (i.e. building on the current private/public system of delivering health care) with “denial horror stories from Canada & Co.”

Focus on timeliness — “the plan put forward by the Democrats will deny people treatments they need and make them wait to get the treatments they are allowed to receive” — and argue that Republicans will provide “in a word, more: ‘more access to more treatments and more doctors…with less interference from insurance companies and Washington politicians and special interests.’”

But that’s the major problem with Luntz’s memo: it tries to obstruct health reform by ignoring what Obama is actually offering. Instead, Luntz is attacking an easy extreme — what he wishes the Democrats were proposing — and pretending that the Republicans actually have some kind of health care solution (the memo instructs Republicans to focus on targeting waste, fraud and abuse).

So it’s up to the administration to define health care reform as a way to lower health care costs through competition, expand coverage to all Americans and give everyone a choice of health care providers and health insurers. If the Democrats do this successfully, then Republicans will look like the bureaucratic obstructionists that they warn the public about.

READ FULL MEMO HERE