“Would it Matter to You?” Is the Most Important Question of All

Tea Partier: I haven’t seen that report… [A Harvard study estimating that 45,000 Americans die each year for lack of health insurance.]

Brad Friedman: Would you be troubled by that, as a doctor, 45,000 dying simply because they don’t have insurance each year?

Tea Partier: I think it’s probably a lot more complicated than that. I haven’t read it so I can’t really comment.

Brad Friedman: But if you read it, and you saw it, would you be troubled as a medical doctor?

Tea Partier: I would probably find that the headline and the substance probably don’t match up.

Bradblog’s recent video of interviews of Tea-Partiers is worth watching in its entirety, but for me the most pertinent question from Friedman comes at the 8.09 mark when Friedman talks to someone who seems to be better educated than his fellow tea-partiers, a man who has apparently identified himself as a physician.

What Friedman is essentially asking is, “Would those deaths matter to you?” He’s not asking the man if he actually thinks the report is true. He’s asking if it would matter to him if it were. And in response, the Tea Partier quite deliberately sidesteps the question, pretending it’s about something else entirely.

When someone does that, you can usually bet that the answer is, “no.”

"Would it matter to you?" is the question that the people driving the Tea Party movement truly fear. Answering it directly and honestly would reveal the ugly fact underlying all the obfuscation we’ve been seeing. The recent blatant lies aired by Fox inflating the numbers who attended last weeks Tea Party, all the nonsense about “death panels,” those are distractions. They’re worth mentioning and should be pointed out as the lies that they are, but becoming too entangled in them can prevent you from getting to the nub of it all.

The philosophy driving the forces opposed to health care reform can be summed up in a simple, brutal slogan, “I Got Mine. To Hell With You.” And if you get into an extended debate with some Tea Partiers, if you ask that same question asked by Brad Friedman and are persistent about getting an answer, that’s what it will eventually come down to.