How to Brainwash People to Accept Nazi Health Care Policy

May 28, 2009 (LPAC)—The behavioral economists' lobby met today, on Capitol Hill, to plot their strategy to make health care "reform" happen and to make sure that behavioral economics is at the center of whatever reform emerges from Congress. The meeting was convened by the American Benefits Council, the trade group for Fortune 500 companies that sponsor or administer retirement and health plans. The Russell Sage Foundation and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) were all over the agenda. Typical were David Laibson, a member of the Behavioral Economists Roundtable and a co-organizer of Russell Sage's Summer School on Behavioral Economics, and Dr. Alan Garber, the Henry J. Kaiser Jr. Professor of Medicine and Economics at Stanford University, as well as, among many other things, director of the health Care Program at the NBER.

Central to the discussion was the use of mass marketing techniques to brainwash people, through behavior modification, into accepting what are essentially Nazi policies. Garber was most explicit in this when he challenged the audience (which seemed to be drawn mainly of benefit managers for large corporations or the insurance business) to think about "what do they have the stomach for."

"We know how to lower costs but, it's not clear that we'll be happy with the consequences," Garber said. "For example, you could say we're going to limit the availability of all biologicals for second- and third-line treatment of advanced cancers. Those save quite a bit of money but it may be something you're not willing to do." Instead, he proposed, they may think about changing the defaults, that is, what people can expect to receive in terms of care. After dismissing the idea of trying to further shift costs to the employee, he said, "we could think about changing expectations and giving people not so much a financial skin in the game but more of an emotional and social skin in the game, by thinking about health care dollars as scarce resources, thinking about what would be appropriate care. Think about end-of-life care, for example, where there's a lot of care that is enormously expensive that probably isn't going to do much good." So, therefore, the question is "what approaches would be acceptable," since cost shifting won't work.