Stop Talking About Health Care, Start Talking About People

The following excerpt from Hildy Gottlieb's article at the Stanford Social Innovation Review explains why, if we want Americans to be healthy, we must change the language in our conversations.

What made Mothers Against Drunk Driving succeed while the War on Drugs failed? Answer that, and you’ll have the key to changing the national conversation about health in the U.S.

That is because movements for progressive change consistently succeed when they begin and end with people, not things.

The success of the American Civil Rights Movement, for example, was largely a response to TV images of real people. Most people had no clue about the finer points of the legislation; they just wanted to stop innocent people from getting hurt. Mothers Against Drunk Driving was not about legal blood-alcohol limits and breathalyzers; it was about saving loved ones’ lives. Support for gay marriage grew swiftly when the conversation moved from an issue about equal rights to the highly personal message of love and commitment.

Now consider all the decades of efforts where no matter what was tried, nothing worked. One factor all those situations have in common: the conversation (and the legislation that followed) is not about people; it’s about things.

• The war on drugs(vs. helping people be whole and healthy)
• The war on poverty(vs. helping people reach their potential)
• The war on terror(vs. alleviating the suffering that motivates people to blow up themselves and others

Criminal justice system reform. Abolishing the death penalty. Gun control. Neither the names we bestow on these conversations, nor the conversations themselves, focus on people. Instead, we talk about things—mandatory sentencing, waiting periods, gun safety.

The conversation about health in the United States has followed that same pattern:

• Healthcare(vs. people being healthy, well, and happy)
• Pre-existing conditions(vs. people being sick and suffering)
• Single-payer(vs. people being able to afford the basic necessities of life)
• Medicaid(vs. people who have lost their life savings to take care of a loved one, ending up destitute with no healthcare for themselves)
• Insurance companies(vs. the people who get to decide what care my mother can have)

If we really want to make life better for people, where are the people in these conversations? Conversations that create real change aren’t about systems or money; they are about what people really want.

And here is what we want: We want to be healthy. We want to know that if we are sick, we will be cared for with love, compassion, and wisdom so that we can once again live healthy, vital lives. We want the same for the people we love. And we don’t want to have to fight for that when we’re at our weakest or sickest.

Before there can be legislation that makes Americans truly healthy, we must make fundamental changes to how we talk about healthcare.

• We must first change what we call this conversation.
• And we must change the talking points that pundits and legislators emphasize within the conversation.

Without these fundamental pieces in place, the stories we share about real people’s lives will fall on deaf ears.

The reason for this is simple: It’s rooted in how our brains work.

Healthcare Language and the Brain
It is no coincidence that the successful campaigns for marriage equality and stiffer drunk driving laws seemed to happen overnight. Those people-focused approaches are rooted in the wiring of the human brain.

The brain’s first job is to keep us alive. Reactive brain functions like fear and empathy, for example, protect us as individuals and as a species. Neuroscientists have found that the brain’s centers for reason and creativity respond more slowly than these hard-wired survival reflexes.

Because those survival functions are similar in all of us, it makes sense that most of us agree that we want people to be healthy and safe, free from danger. And because the more analytical and creative parts of the brain vary widely from person to person, we are more likely to disagree about how to accomplish those end results.

In language terms, we tend to agree on the “why” of human safety and health (survival). Conversations focused on people get to the heart of that “why.” Conversely, we all tend to have our own unique ideas about “how.” Conversations about things are almost always about “how.”

As a result, the words we choose determine whether a conversation begins where we all agree, or if we will disagree from the start.

It is also important to understand how the human brain processes the words we hear. To maximize efficiency in handling so many complex operations at the same time, our brains regularly use shortcuts, such that a single word or image can represent a complex chain of thoughts and emotions. That is why, for example, the mere mention of the name of a politician can elicit instant appreciation or rage. In our brain’s shortcut, that one name represents every thought and emotion we have about that person.

Combine our hard-wired empathy and fears with our brains’ system of creating shortcuts, and we see that it makes sense to choose language that intentionally creates an empathetic shortcut. And because we are also wired to disagree about the “how,” it makes sense to avoid language that divides us—the “how” language of “things.”

For details about language that will create a healthy America, click to the Stanford Social Innovation Review article from which this post is excerpted.