There is certainly a need for some limits on how widely government information is disseminated. The best example would involve treaty negotiations, but labor negotiations or military planning would easily fall within the topics where some amount of secrecy is appropriate and there are a few more types of information that should be included here for consideration.
In my book, A Broken Sausage Grinder; Is Our Government Fundamentally Flawed?, I wrote: “All over America, at every level of government, we find varying degrees of governmental secrecy being practiced against the interests of the citizens.” But nobody is asking, why is there some motivation for secrecy in the first place? What makes an elected official think that telling the whole truth is the wrong thing to do?
I’m not talking about Edward Snowden here. No, I am talking about our President and his continuing efforts to spin the meaning of his words about the impacts of the Affordable Care Act. We are all grownups here so if his words were meant one way and then interpreted another way, we should be able to accept the whole truth about what was said and what was meant and then move on, but for some reason that just doesn’t work in politics. Every elected official somehow feels the need to be right – it is like they can’t make mistakes in anything they say or do. And, both sides of the aisle feel that way.
It seems to me that we would all be best served if the President would just admit that he said what he said and tell us what he thought it meant at the time. I suspect he is probably guilty of some oversimplification when he said that “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it.” – Don’t forget that if he gets too wordy we lose interest really fast.
Then there is the precision of the English language when it comes to making a point. I have often said that if three people are in a conversation, there will be at least four opinions about what is said. If we are fair, we know that the President’s early remarks couldn’t have compelled the insurance companies to do anything that would have been less profitable, but someone should have told him that the minimum coverage required under the Affordable Care Act might cause some existing policies (some that people liked) to be obsolete.
Of course this all makes for more political theater with the Republicans swinging for the fences and the Democrats trying to defend against the long ball while we try to figure out who to believe and how it matters to us.
The Affordable Care Act website has been a disaster and yet, there are people who have medical insurance today that could not get it before. The website is getting better according to pretty much all non-Republicans, but it is not yet ready for the amount of simultaneous usage that is required for ultimate success. Insurance companies are recommending replacement policies that are more expensive than the ones being replaced and we all know they want to make more profits, so why are we surprised?
In the end, we all need to realize that this new law is complicated and it wasn’t enacted with the intention of hurting anyone. That said, sometimes things don’t work as they were intended and changes must be made, but changing anything in government is particularly difficult with all this dysfunction we see every day. It is up to each of us to take a deep breath and tell our elected officials that we expect better from them. We all need to act like Americans.
The Sausage Grinder is Broken – will you help to fix it?
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