I thought this was a great article by James Surowiecki in today’s New Yorker (and see some good commentary by Matt Yglesias). Surowiecki argues that the troubling turns in the health-care debate become pretty easy to understand if you consider the way our minds work:
But the public’s skittishness about overhauling the system also reflects something else: the deep-seated psychological biases that make people resistant to change. Most of us, for instance, are prey to the so-called “endowment effect”: the mere fact that you own something leads you to overvalue it. A simple demonstration of this was an experiment in which some students in a class were given coffee mugs emblazoned with their school’s logo and asked how much they would demand to sell them, while others in the class were asked how much they would pay to buy them. Instead of valuing the mugs similarly, the new owners of the mugs demanded more than twice as much as the buyers were willing to pay. The academics Ziv Carmon and Dan Ariely showed the same thing in a real-world experiment: posing as ticket scalpers, they phoned people who had entered a raffle to win tickets to a Duke basketball game. People who hadn’t won tickets were willing to pay, on average, a hundred and seventy dollars to get into the game. But those who had won tickets wanted twenty-four hundred dollars to part with them. In other words, those who had, by pure luck, won the tickets thought the ducats were fourteen times as valuable as those who hadn’t.
Also playing a role in Surowieki’s explanation is rampant status quo bias, and, while he doesn’t mention it, I’d throw a health dose of risk aversion into the mix (although that’s somewhat linked with the endowment effect).
When you think about it, it’s probably not too surprising that emotions are running so high. It’s banal to observe that health care is deeply personal and cuts right to our most deeply rooted survival instincts, but it’s still true. You can’t really blame the people who were whipped into a frenzy last fall over Barack Obama’s putative “palling around with terrorists” to feel uneasy with letting the man make decisions about health care–despite how unsubstantiated claims about the actual level of government intervention in health care itself actually are (and let’s not forget that Research 2000 poll showing the broad overlap between “birthers”–people committed to the idea that Obama is secretly a foreign national–and those who believe the “death panel” rumors).
Wrap this up with evidence that conservatives are dispositionally inclined towards a stronger threat response, and this mess becomes somewhat more understandable. Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as dismayed and disgusted by where we are as anyone else who supports reform, but I do think we should countenance the argument that it’s largely a product of our flawed psychologies. Somehow I find myself feeling mildly sympathetic towards the town-hall nuts, and even though I’m not exactly sure where to go from there, admitting our weaknesses is probably a good first step.
