Healthcare Reform and Climate Change
Blog topic: What climate change and health care reform have in common?
It is interesting to note the shift in tone about climate change. Gone is the certainty of impending global doom, originally probably best reflected in the exaggerations of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," the Nobel Price that followed and in the U.N.'s. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate sciences have, therefore, rightly developed a credibility gap with the public, which not only mimic the Obama administration's when it comes to health care reform but, psychologically, actually appear to reinforce each other .
For the public it suddenly feels like nobody can be trusted when even highly regarded scientists at the Universities of East Anglia and Pennsylvania, both centers of scientific excellence, fabricate numbers and apparently even conspire to hide dissent. The sense is that if scientist can no longer be trusted, how can politicians, with much lower credibility in the first place, be believed when they try to sell us on the wisdom ObamaCare?
Climategate and ObamaCare have, indeed, more in common than one might think on first impression: Both address socially and economically vastly important issues which, whatever the final outcome, will profoundly influence current and future generations. Both have the potential of changing the face of the nation by radically affecting the national economy. Both attempt major revisions of the status quo based on incredibly sparse data sets, and, therefore, to a significant degree only appeal to believers but are rejected by those seeking evidence first. Both are driven by the same proponents, mostly on the left, and opponents, usually on the right, and both have the potential of creating enormous national deficits for years to come.
Both lost credibility with the public because proponents are perceived as manipulating data and presenting incredulous outcome claims. Consciously and subconsciously, the country, therefore, simply no longer believes anything, whether it comes from Democrats, Republicans or President Obama, himself. This complete lack of trust in the political process is not only extremely dangerous for health care reform but promises future stalemates for many other important issues facing the nation. Who, for example, can under such conditions muster enough credibility to offer an acceptable solution for illegal immigration?
Viewing climate sciences and health care reform structurally, they share important further characteristics. Both represent highly complex multifactorial systems, which even today's most advanced computer systems cannot yet satisfactorily simulate. This is where uncertainties about global warming come from, and where from discrepancies in cost projections for ObamaCare derive. What the public instinctively, and correctly, senses is that neither climate nor health care, at the present time, can really be objectively and accurately assessed and, therefore, projected. Even well meaning climatologists don't have the tools to prove with a high degree of certainty whether fossil fuels do or do not cause global warming and even the most talented economists are not in a position to accurately predict future effects of a 2000 plus page new health care bill on the nation's economy.
Scientists are used living with such uncertainties. They have learned to tackle complex multifactorial problems incrementally by isolating individual steps and working in this way, step by step, towards an ultimate goal. Einstein developed the Theory of Relativity with the goal of finding a unifying theory of physics. He and others have so far failed to do so but the Theory of Relativity, in the meantime, has served mankind well.
Medicine, itself, is a good example for such incremental progress. Nobody in medical research would dare exposing thousands of patients to a potentially toxic drug just because some investigators believe the drug may have beneficial results. Drugs, first of all, have to be animal tested, then follow basic safety studies in humans, followed by incremental clinical trials and only once safety and efficacy are proven is a drug released for universal use. As one step builds on the next, course corrections are possible at every moment, should circumstances so require.
This is the only approach that makes sense in a multifactorial situation where outcomes cannot be simulated and are, therefore, completely unpredictable. The all or nothing approach of global warming supporters and proponents of ObamaCare is, therefore, not only unnecessarily dangerous but, frankly, difficult to understand. Science is always evolution rather than revolution, and politicians should finally recognize that in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, where multifactoriality steadily increases there simply is no more place for revolutionary upheavals.
And, yet, this is exactly what climate sciences and ObamaCare have been trying to do: Instead of taking small and incremental steps towards ultimate goals of preserving our environment and developing a better health care system for the nation, both offer revolutionary approaches. The public senses this commonality in both and, therefore, in great majorities also rejects both.
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