Why the House of
Representatives Failed to Pass the American Health Care Act
Passing the AHCA would have overturned the status quo, ObamaCare, just as ObamaCare overturned the prior status quo, healthcare is an individual, not a government, responsibility.
Tim Riesterer, instructor in the art
of corporate storytelling, in his storytelling framework, explains that human
beings have an innate bias to maintaining the status quo.
There is a good reason for this. It is
called fear. We are hard-wired to avoid
danger.
We think the status quo protects us
against danger in 4 ways.
1.
We prefer stability and see change as a threat
to that stability.
2. We
believe the status quo is free and that there is a cost to change. We generally like to avoid higher costs.
3. Information
overload. Too much information makes selection difficult. Staying with the
status quo is easier than sorting through all of the options.
4. We
don’t change because we anticipate we will regret our decision to give up on
the status quo. We project that what we
talked our colleagues in to won’t be as successful as we led them to believe it
would be.
We can eliminate status quo bias
in 4 ways.
1. Weaken
the status quo preference by introducing hidden challenges that make the status
quo a less safe (more dangerous) course
2. Showing
the cost of inaction. Unfortunately, we tend to make decisions more often to
avoid loss than to realize a gain.
3. Contrast
the status quo with the benefits of taking action to solve a problem. Paint
side-by-side pictures of the current situation and the new and improved
situation in order to make the case for change.
4. Personalize
the need for change.
Back to the AHCA, the Republicans
who favored the proposed law failed to show that the real health care danger
was not in changing the law but in not changing it.
The GOP also failed to speak directly to the
voters who were motivating the proposal’s opponents, by failing to personalize that the
status quo ObamaCare would be more expensive to voters than the new American
Health Care Act.
The Republican policy wonks also
overwhelmed voters with statistical information, focusing on billions and
trillions of federal dollars rather than thousands of dollars in personal health
care outlays. Congressmen who favored the AHCA failed to convince their
colleagues that failing to vote for the new healthcare bill was a vote for the
status quo, which was the vote that would fraught with regret.
Republicans could have turned the
situation around by undermining their colleagues’ apparent preference for the
status quo. They could have accomplished this by projecting the future anger of
their constituents when they saw their premiums continue to skyrocket and their
health care choices dwindle.
The AHCA’s supporters should have
focused their messaging like a LASER on the personal costs of not changing to
the proposed new law and less on the legislative and policy nuances of the
changes.
The bill’s supporters lead by
Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, should have driven home the personal cost
issue with a side-by-side comparison of a family’s cost under ObamaCare and
under the proposed AHCA. They should have learned the effectiveness of visual
imagery from the Democrats’ “Paul Ryan wants to push Granny off the cliff” video
ad attacking the then Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.
In the scare-tactic video, a man
who appears to be Paul Ryan pushes an elderly woman in a wheelchair over a
cliff in order to make the Democrats’ point that election of Republican Mitt
Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan would result in the death of senior
citizens who are dependent on Medicare for healthcare. Ryan blamed the Granny
ads for turning the country against him thus clearing the way for the election
of Barack Obama, the father of ObamaCare.
Again, the ACHA supporters should
have spent more time and money personalizing the advantages of change and the
dangers of the status quo, by putting a face on the health care debate rather
than building the messaging around dry policy issues most voters don’t pay
attention to. This is something President Obama himself recognized when he
trotted out little Marcelas Owens front and center at the signing ceremony for
the ObamaCare legislation in March 2010.