Roland Duerksen: ‘Slippery slope’ not always outcome we should dread

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1:41 PM Wednesday, November 4, 2009

We have heard and read a great deal about health care reform in recent months. We need to hear and read about it (and so do our representatives and senators) until our government finally installs a health care system that, to keep costs down, provides a public option.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and others are afraid that the public option would put us on a slippery slope leading to a single-payer system. They may be right. A true liberal favors a Canadian or European single-payer system and sees the public option — about which the argument now swirls — as a necessary compromise. And that is compromise enough.

The slippery-slope metaphor has long served well to warn people against entering areas of thought and action that may take them — beyond their control — to undesired results. We need constantly to be on guard against such an eventuality. But the slippery slope need not always have a negative connotation.

Airline passengers who have just crash-landed may owe their lives to a slippery slope that takes them to safety. A shipyard would not want to be without its slippery slope at launching time. The value of the slope to sledding and skiing is obvious.

Some would say that Benjamin Franklin ventured onto a slippery slope when he founded the volunteer (as opposed to private-enterprise) fire company. It led not to undesired results, but to government-run fire stations throughout the country.

Not always does treading on “dangerous” ground produce results that conservatives predict. The establishment of public universities in the U.S. did not lead to a fully government-financed higher-education system, such as those prevalent in European countries — desirable, though, as that might have been. And the presence of the TVA and electrical cooperatives has not given us socialized electricity.

Sen. Hatch’s fear of the public-option slippery slope exemplifies the governmental timidity that has been prevalent ever since President Ronald Reagan uttered his Orwellian declaration (shortly before the year 1984): “Government is the problem.” Though hideous governmental distortion is the problem in George Orwell’s novel, had the author foreseen Reagan’s comment, he would have added it to his three prime examples of “newspeak”: “War is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.”

Let’s note that legislators may use arguments related to the slippery-slope metaphor as a smokescreen for their allegiance to deep-pocketed insurance companies, rather than to the well-being of citizens. Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Evan Bayh, D-Ind., (along with their wives) come readily to mind.

Of course, none of us knows whether or not inclusion of the public option would ultimately lead to a single-payer system, but that is not the question. The point is that we’ve got to have health care reform and it must contain a means of keeping the insurance companies from running the cost astronomically higher.

Later we can deal with either opposing or supporting the single-payer system. At present, the public-option compromise is good enough. It is an urgent necessity.

Roland A. Duerksen is a retired Miami University professor.

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