Flawed Conservative Reasoning Misses the Bigger Picture

At dinner last week, my boyfriend's politically conservative, 86-year-old grandmother recounted how her good friend, an "extreme Republican" (her words), pays $2,200 each month on pills to keep herself alive. "She can't get the pills in any other country," Keith's grandma reported with seeming pride. "The doctors won't give out such expensive medicine to someone so old." With a knowing air, she questioned, "What do you think about that?" as if at that moment, she would convince the rest of us to abandon our progressive stances on health care reform.

Regardless of the fact that her friend's story simply wasn't true -- at the dining table were two vacationing friends from France and a Canadian, all three of whom explained that her friend was mistaken -- Keith's grandma's logic got me thinking. Why were we still debating health care at the dinner table, a year after the controversial topic was first broached? Why did my endless statistics about people suffering, even dying, from lack of affordable insurance fail to resonate with this otherwise caring, generous woman?

After pondering the question over my meal, I came to a key, if tentative, conclusion: due to following two major flawed lines of reasoning, conservatives like Keith's grandma are missing the bigger picture when it comes to health care (the reform bill, thankfully, was able to pass the House without a single conservative supporter) and, more broadly, social programs that benefit the poor.

First, in their minds, existence trumps access. According to this philosophy, America's health care system is the best in the world because of its modern technological equipment and first-class medical centers. No matter that the average American will never be able to afford to use cutting-edge machines or receive treatment from the country's finest surgeons; disregard the fact that Americans are leaving the county in ever-greater numbers in search of cheaper prescription drugs and medical procedures. The mere fact that our country can boast the newest technologies eliminates any need for reform. As Keith's grandma reasoned, at least her (wealthy) friend can access life-preserving pills in America, even if it means paying $24,000 a year (a number roughly equivalent to the federal poverty level for a family of four).

The second tenet of this conservative mentality is that ideals reign over results. This logic prizes revolutionary ideals -- liberty, small government -- even when said ideals fail to achieve positive results for the majority of Americans. Regulation of private enterprise, for example, must consistently be avoided, even when unfettered business hurts the middle-class and the poor (like internet companies' refusal to provide broadband access to rural communities). The sad reality, as we've seen in the past year's health care struggle, is that low-income Americans from conservative regions often subscribe to this reasoning themselves, repeatedly voting down regulation-heavy legislation that could help lift them from poverty; just look at the eight of America's 10 unhealthiest states that lie in the Republican-dominated South, where the phrases "health care reform" and "socialism" are paired together like bread and butter.

I truly do support President Obama's efforts to reach across the aisle and foster bipartisanship in Congress. But before Democrats and Republicans can sit down together and negotiate the nitty-gritty details of legislation, someone's got to call conservatives out on their faulty, sometimes dangerous lines of reasoning. For poor Americans, it's truly a matter of life and death.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Flue