Newsletters

POSTED: June 18th, 2018
POSTED IN: EM Pulse - The Official Newsletter of MOCEP, May/June 2018,

Harry J. Monroe, Jr.
Director, Chapter and State Relations, ACEP

Over the years, I have worked with many lobbyists preparing for upcoming meetings. In some of those instances, the lobbyist would be gathering information to represent us himself in meetings of stakeholders or legislators or staff. In other instances, the legislator was preparing the client to give testimony at a legislative hearing.

In all of these circumstances, every good lobbyist I have worked with has required an answer to this question: what is the argument of the other side? What will our opponent say?

If you do not have a fair answer to that question, then you are not yet prepared to provide your testimony.

Because we tend to live in an environment in which we share our views with people who agree with them, too often we fail to think through the alternative point of view. Thus, insurers are against us, we often state, for example, because they are only in this for the money. They don’t care about their “customers,” our patients. The bottom line for their shareholders is their only concern.

My point is not that there is not a point to this. However, no insurer is going to arrive at a hearing to explain that, you know, we caught him. He doesn’t care about anything but making a buck.

There are no Perry Mason endings at legislative hearings. Insurers don’t confess.

The truth is that insurers, wrongly I think most of the time, have their own story, their own rationale, for their policy. We have to understand that story so that we are sure to be able to counter it – and to avoid walking into traps as we tell our own story.

None of this to say that we should have a need to fully explain or defend the insurer’s point of view. Quite the contrary, a more typical approach, as appropriate, would be to briefly summarize the opposition’s position before pivoting to an explanation as to why it is wrong and how we have a better solution to the problem that the policy maker wants to solve.

That sort of response is a way of showing ourselves to be fair minded and solutions oriented. It is a crucial part of effective state advocacy.