I was watching an Allstate ad when it struck me how dishonest the ad was*. You see, the ad makes much of "accident forgiveness", which means your rates won't go up when you have an accident. It sounds good, until you read the fine print, which says you "can still lose your good driver discount". And that's the rub. Instead of charging a lower rate for safe drivers, they give a 5% "rebate" if you don't have an accident, which you lose when using "accident forgiveness". And so, that means, effectively, your rates go up 5% when your rated "don't go up". But, because of how they phrased things, they are technically honest in saying your rate has not changed.

I don't mention this to bash Allstate, I am sure other insurers use similar gimmicks to hide their rate increases, and the way insurers are regulated by the states, I am sure Allstate is forced into some such semantic tricks to get around regulatory rules. No, I am not interested in the ad itself, but what the ad represents, and that is the use of semantics to hide reality.

I wrote about this before, just today in "Can We Ban the Word "Scarce"?" and before in a more general way in "Protean Terminology", but I think it deserves another look, especially as it has figured in so many recent political debates. In fact, more than any other aspect of politics, the use and misuse of definitions is at the heart of most of political debate. From the rhetoric used to justify every intervention to those "fact check" essays news organizations use to protect political allies and tear down the opposition, creative definition serves to shield politicians from blame and hide the truth of many measures from the public.

For example, much of our health care debate centers on the sound bites postulating that "46 million are without insurance". The numbers change slightly, but the basic premise is that about 1 in 6 Americans lack insurance. (Some go even farther and raise it as high as 1 in 3, though those more ambitious claims are much less common.) It is not a claim that seems a good candidate for abuse of definitions, after all, we know what "people" means, and certainly know what "without insurance" means, but strangely enough, with only those two very simple elements, the abusers of language found more than enough room to redefine both terms to their advantage.

I discussed this already in "A Most Dishonest Commercial" and "There ARE NOT 46 Million Uninsured!", as well as "Medical Reform, An Overview" and elsewhere, but allow me to very quickly reveal the trick behind the numbers. First, the interesting redefinition of "without insurance". Second, the expansive view of "people".

The number trick is the more obvious of the two. When various studies are cited as showing ""X Americans are without insurance" or "were without insurance in year Y", the average listener takes it to mean that that many individuals did not have any insurance for the whole of that year, or at least for 10 months out of 12 or some other meaningful period. The problem is, such studies as I could find usually account based upon any lapse of insurance, including even one day. As I said in another essay, the popular 46 million figure for 2004 includes me (and my wife) as my insurance lapsed for two weeks between jobs. Even though I am far from uninsured, I am included in those numbers**.

Actually, there is an even more deceptive redefinition, though an implicit one. Not only is it suggested that these individuals are without insurance for a full year when they might be uninsured for only days, but they are often described as "lacking access to health care", which is a quite different proposition. If the "uninsured" designation is misleading, but technically accurate, the "lack of access" claim is neither accurate nor honest. True, these 46 million people did not have insurance for some period in the year in question, but that doe snot mean they could not see a doctor. First, for emergency care, they could always go to a an emergency room and not be turned away. But even for other care, they always have the option of paying out fo pocket, or looking for doctors and clinics offering discount or free service if they cannot afford full price. To describe lacking insurance as being identical to having no access to care is a dishonest redefinition.

The second dishonest redefinition is the "46 million Americans". When we hear that, most of us think of US citizens, or maybe resident aliens, but that number includes a very large number of illegal aliens, who, due to legal problems, simply can't have insurance. However, that fact probably would not trouble most people if brought to their attention. That illegal aliens can't buy insurance is hardly a crisis in the mind of most Americans. However, if the definition used is either citizens or citizens and legal aliens, then the number drops by 1/3 to 1/2, and that makes it a lot less impressive. So, quite quietly, the great mass of illegals who can't buy insurance, are lumped into the group to inflate numbers, all without telling those the numbers are intended to persuade.

But the dishonesty is hardly unique to the medical debate, it is but one of many areas. For another, let us look at the budget.

Everyone is well aware of the absurdity of "baseline budgeting". This is the trick that allows the same numbers to be called both an increase and a cut depending on one's political orientation. Let us say the current budget for widget subsidies is $100 million. Since we expect 5% growth next year in all government spending, we have a "baseline" of $105 million for widget subsidies next year. A clever politician proposes to limit the budget to $103 million. His opponents, working on behalf of the widget lobby, call this a horrible "cut", even though the numbers go up 3%. Similarly, politicians can play other games with this, such as assuming growth that is absurdly high, allowing them to raise budgets all around while claiming to have "no growth in spending". For example, if you want a 10% increase in budget for X, rather than having a 5% baseline increase and enough growth to make up the remaining 5% (~4.7% after the 5% baseline increase), why not just have 10% baseline growth? And since this will increase everyone's pet projects 10% without having to "increase spending", at least on paper, who will object?

But those sort of games are simple compared to others. For example, the many subterfuges used to meet "balanced budget" requirements, such as shifting spending into next year to avoid running over this year. Or, even more clever, shifting it to LAST year, as there are no retroactive penalties for ruining the budget after the fact. And all accomplished by semantic games, defining spending in a given year as "belonging" to another through some sort of linguistic games.

Or the favorite of modern games, war that aren't wars. Since the end of World War II it has been politically unacceptable to be at war, especially since the Vietnam conflict and the birth of a perpetual, politically connected peace movement. So, rather than wars, we have "police actions", "interventions", "conflicts", "training cadres" and every other manner of military action short of war. All of which means that the important constitutional requirement that the use of the military be approved by two branches of government has effectively been removed, as there is no longer need for a declaration of war when there is no war. And so we see the many political tugs of war over who can and cannot commit the military, who needs to approve continued military action and so on. All questions once thought settled, yet now thrown into chaos thanks to our semantic games.

And that is why I make so much of this single issue. Not because of the dishonesty alone, though that is troubling, especially when you consider the true meaning of a government which must deceive its citizens to accomplish its ends. Or, worse still, what the philosophy must be of those politicians who think their desires justify deceiving citizens. But worse than that dishonesty are the consequences of the deceptions, the redefinitions, the creation fo protean terms and the elimination of old, definite definitions.

You see, our government was meant to be certain, it was to be run by clear laws, applied with a high degree of consistency. Yes, there was room for legislation and interpretation, but in general it was expected the law would be impartial and consistent. However, once you start allowing terms to be redefined to suit political ends, that becomes impossible. Predictability is only possible if the same rules produce the same results, but if the rules, the conditions and the consequences could all change meaning as the political fashions change, there is no predictability. And, rather than any sort of certainty, we are left with the ever changing chaos we see today both in our legislatures and our courts of law.

And that is why I complain about semantic games. Yes, dishonesty is troubling, but a dishonest politicians can only do so much harm, and they can be removed from office should they do too much damage. A dishonest language on the other hand cannot help but do incalculable damage. And so I must insist we treat language with a bit more respect, treating words as having meanings, and meanings that do not change from day to day. To do any less is to invite dire consequences.

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* As I said elsewhere, this is not intended as criticism of Allstate. They simply offered an ideal example at a time when I was planning to write about this topic.

** These numbers also mislead by failing to reveal the many who opt out of insurance because they can either pay out of pocket or because they choose to use HSAs or other alternate schemes. But as this is not a problem of definition, I do not include it in the essay proper.

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POSTSCRIPT

Rather than elaborate at length about the harms of unpredictability, allow me to direct readers to the following posts: "In Praise of Slow Changes", "Predictability", "Conservatism, Incremental Change and Federalism", "Empathy" Threatens not "Justice" but Predictability", "Sotomayor and Empathy", "Humor and Nightmare", "In Defense of Standards", "Addenda to "In Defense of Standards"". In addition, similar arguments can be found in my posts "Pragmatism Revistied, Again", "The Shortcomings of Pragmatism" and "Pragmatism Revisited". Though they are about pragmatism as a political philosophy, as pragmatism shares many traits with political uncertainty those essays will provide additional background on this post. In addition, my posts specifically on questions of medical reform can be found by reading "Medical Reform, An Overview", "Redefining Insurance... To Actually BE Insurance", "Reviving Nonsense in the White House",  "A Simple Question", "An Interesting Conversation" and "Bad Economics Part 10" and following the links they contain.