But George, You're a Communist!

Not infrequently one comes across the expression, "That's an ad hominem," in various dialogue contexts, implying one has obviously violated a rule of reasoning or standard of good argument. And, in fact, that may often indeed be the case, the particular fallacy in this instance being an argument (or a move in an argument) "directed to the man," in other words, one has criticized the arguer at the expense of the argument. In Douglas Walton's words, an argumentum ad hominem "is a personal attack on an arguer that brings the individual's personal circumstances, trustworthiness or character into question." In our assessment of the plausibility, soundness or persuasiveness of an argument, such a "personal attack is inherently dangerous and [unduly] emotional...and is rightly associated with fallacies and deceptive tactics of argumentation." What follows is generally inspired by Walton's work, especially his book, Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation (1989).

Walton informs us that there are generally three types of ad hominem argument:
1. The "abusive" ad hominem "is the direct attack on a person in argument, including the questioning or villification of his character, motives, or trustworthiness."
2. The "circumstantial" ad hominem "is the questioning or criticizing the personal circumstances of an arguer, allegedly revealed, for example, in his actions, affiliations, or previous commitments, by citing an alleged inconsistency between his arguments and the circumstances."
3. The "poisoning the well" type of ad hominem "is said to occur when the critic questions the sincerity or objectivity of an arguer by suggesting that the arguer has something to gain by supporting the argument he has advocated."

It's important to appreciate, however, that the ad hominem argument is just that, namely, an argument, and thus "is not always logically unreasonable or fallacious." The foremost reason for this can be inferred from the fact that the argumentum ad hominem, when fallacious, is by definition an informal (thus not formal) fallacy, hence the determination of whether or not the argument is reasonable entails a close examination of its specific incarnation within a particular dialogue form and context. Put differently, in the myriad rhetorical fora of practical reasoning and dialogue forms in everyday social and institutional settings, the identification of an informal fallacy is neither "field invariant" (Toulmin 2003) nor transparent. We therefore need to carefully consider precisely how this argument form is being used in a dialogue context before we can claim the argument is fallacious or unreasonalble. On occasion, what appears at first glance to be a fallacious ad hominem may in fact turn out to be a rather reasonable or perfectly appropriate--thus nonfallacious--use of the ad hominen argumentum. Walton provides us with a fairly straightforward if not simple illustration of a nonfallacious use of the ad hominem:

GEORGE: The notorious problems we have been having with postal strikes means that there is no longer reliable mail service provided by the government. I think we ought to allow private, for-profit mail delivery companies to compete on an equal footing with the Post Office.

BOB: But George, you are a communist.

Let us suppose that in this case George is an avowed communist and has based his previous arguments on many standard communist principles and positions. Now in many cases, calling your opponent in an argument a communist could be a fallacious type of ad hominem attack. However, in this instance, Bob seems to have a reasonable point. If George is an avowed communist, and communists are for state control and against private enterprise, then how can George consistently argue for a for-profit mail service run by private enterprise. It seems like a legitimate question. Of course, George may be able to resolve the ostensible inconsistency in subsequent dialogue. But surely Bob is justified in challenging the consistency of George's position at this point in the dialogue. If so, then in this case, Bob's circumstantial argument is not fallacious.

In a courtroom, the testimony of a witness may be undermined by subjecting it to questions that center upon her motives or character or past behavior in an effort to expose the individual's testimony as irredeemably tainted, as considerably less than impartial, trustworthy, or true. In such cases, it appears that the ad hominem is well-suited to the task at hand and thus is a perfectly appropriate argument. This is not to suggest, of course, that it is invariably reasonable in such settings or not structurally prone to abuse.

Sometimes it's quite difficult to unequivocally determine whether or not an ad hominem is fallacious, as it's not clear precisely how much contextual information is essential to a fair assessment of the argument. The following, for example, enables us to see how interpretive issues having to do with the particular dialogue and its interlocutors may be decisive in a complete reckoning of the relative merits of the argument on each side:

PARENT: There is strong evidence of a link between smoking and obstructive lung disease. Smoking is also associated with many other serious disorders. Smoking is unhealthy. So you should not smoke.

CHILD: But you smoke yourself. So much for your argument against smoking.

If we've had any philosophical training, and perhaps even if not, I suspect we're tempted to be dismissive of (if otherwise sympathetic to) the child's response to the parent's seemingly impeccable argument. And yet should not something be said on behalf of the child's retort challenging the parent's patent personal inconsistency between word and deed? Assuming the parent intends the argument to be pedagogically persuasive, that is, to steer the child away from the putative charms of smoking, then the argument is not at all as strong as it first appears (I know: a sound argument need not be persuasive, but I'm concerned with arguments in the real world, in which case we want the argument to be both sound and persuasive). In some worlds, we find the child appreciating the force of the argument irrespective of the parent's personal inconsistency, but outside those worlds, that is an unrealistic expectation. Or, as Walton concludes, "surely it is not unreasonable to require that the parent owes the child a defense or examination of his position."

The argumentum ad hominem is often grouped with other so-called emotional fallacies, including "argument to the people" (argumentum ad populum), "argument to pity" (argumentum ad misericordiam), and "argument to the stick" (argumentum ad baculum). These in turn, are classified as informal fallacies as such, of which there are over forty in number (Angeles 1992: 104-110). Referring to these argument forms as "fallacies" even if only informal, is misleading owing to the fact that, qua argument forms, they are not even prima facie fallacious! Nevertheless, it is probably prudent to be presumptively suspicious when we encounter these argument forms, given the frequency with which many of them are used inappropriately. But because we're in the realm of informal logic, the determination of whether or not these forms are in fact fallacious requires careful examination of their use in specific dialogue types and contexts, including the specific chains of reasoning. We might also bear in mind that practical reasoning in everyday social settings is often at best primarily presumptive, where a presumption is a speech act betwixt and between an assumption and an assertion. While we can identify both deductive and inductive reasoning in presumptive argument chains, it is important that our standards and criteria of argument plausibility and persuasiveness are sensitive to this overarching presumptive character, which entails ever-shifting burdens of proof and presumptions alternatively required, reasonable, or permissible.

Strictly speaking, then, if the argument forms classified in logic textbooks as "informal fallacies" are not even prima facie fallacious, they are innocent until proven guilty. Take, for instance, the "argument to the stick," a descriptive label that screams unreasonable or irrational, an argument form that is, finally, prima facie fallacious. Yet even here this form may be, and often is, perfectly proper: as in negotiation dialogues that occur in judicial plea-bargaining, international legal and political settings involving nation-states, and collective bargaining between labor and management. I'm assuming here that while we may conceptually distinguish between "arguing and bargaining" (Elster 1991), on the ground these are inextricably intertwined, making this a perfectly, if painfully, acceptable form of argument. That we require a close examination of these so-called informal fallacies in their dialogues types and social settings to ascertain whether or not they are truly fallacious is perhaps most readily seen in the case of the "argument from authority" or "appeal to expertise" (argumentum ad verecundiam).

In sum, the argument forms referred to as "informal fallacies" are capable of being more or less strong or weak, reasonable or unreasonable, fallacious or not, persuasive or not.

References and Further Reading:

• Angeles, Peter A. The Harper Collins Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: HarperCollins, 2nd ed., 1992.
• Bailin, Sharon W. and Harvey Siegel. "Critical Thinking," in Nigel Blake, et al., eds. The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education. Malden, MA: Blackwell., 2003: 181-193.
• Elster, Jon. "Arguing and Bargaining in the Federal Convention and the Assemblée Constituante," (1991) Working Paper No. 4, Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Europe. Available: http://www.geocities.com/hmelberg/elster/AR91AAB.HTM
• Fisher, Alec. The Logic of Real Arguments. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Groarke, Leo. "Informal Logic," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/logic-informal/.
• Toulmin, Stephen. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003 ed.
• Toulmin, Stephen, Richard Rieke and Allan Janik. An Introduction to Reasoning. New York: Macmillan, 1984 ed.
• Walton, Douglas N. Informal Logic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Walton, Douglas N. Plausible Argument in Everyday Conversation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992.
• Walton, Douglas N. Arguments from Ignorance. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
• Walton, Douglas N. Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
• Warburton, Nigel. Thinking from A to Z. New York: Routledge, 2nd ed., 2000.

Science & Technology: A Basic Bibliography

This installment in the Directed Reading series is a bibliography for "science and technology." It covers philosophy of science, works in different scientific fields, science studies, history of science, technology, as well as science and technology ethics. Like most of our lists, it is limited to books only, in English. Nonetheless, that leaves us with quite a number of titles. As is our practice, the material below will serve as an introduction of sorts to the subject matter of the bibliography and is designed to whet your appetite. Should there be a title or two you believe worthy of inclusion by all means let me know and I'll consider it for the next draft of this compilation.

It is popularly supposed that science can be distinguished from other modes of systematic inquiry by a distinctive method. This is not what is observed. The techniques used in scientific research are extraordinarily diverse, from counting sheep and watching birds to detecting quasars and creating quarks. The epistemic methodologies of research are equally varied, from mental introspection to electronic computation, from quantitative measurement to speculative inference.—John Ziman

In the 1940s Robert Merton proposed the "prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences and permissions" that scientists come to feel bound to, the core of the scientific ethos if you will, were more or less captured by five fundamental norms or regulative principles: Communalism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, Originality, and Scepticism (CUDOS). John Ziman argues that these norms no longer properly describe the ethos of what he terms "post-academic science" or what others call "Big Science." In other words, (academic) science in roughly the last third of the twentieth century underwent "a radical, irreversible, worldwide transformation in the way that [it] is organized, managed and performed." Of course this transformation was not absolute, thus we can speak of both continuities and differences between that sort of science which was formally and informally guided by CUDOS norms and post-academic science. Ziman contends this more straightforwardly industrial (and now highly technological and market-oriented) post-academic science is best understood by way of its alternative set of regulative principles or social norms (as Ziman explains, social and epistemic norms are closely bound up with each other):

Very schematically, industrial science is Proprietary, Local, Authoritarian, Commissioned, and Expert. It produces proprietary knowledge that is not necessarily made public. It is focused on local technical problems rather than on general understanding. Industrial researchers act under managed authority rather than as individuals. Their research is commissioned to achieve practical goals, rather than undertaken in the pursuit of knowledge. They are employed as expert problem-solvers, rather than for their personal creativity. It is no accident, moreover, that these attributes spell out 'PLACE.' That, rather than 'CUDOS,' is what you get for doing good industrial science.

Moreover,

post-academic science is under pressure to give more obvious value for money. Many features of the new mode of knowledge production have arisen 'in the context of application'—that is, in the course of research on technological, environmental, medical or societal problems. More generally, science is being pressed into the service of the nation as the driving force in the national R & D system, a wealth-creating techno-scientific motor for the whole economy.

In other words, utility and market imperatives fuel the ethos and practice of contemporary science to a degree unprecedented in the history of science. As Richard C. Lewontin notes in Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991), science is "guided by and directed by those forces in the world that have control over money and time." Symptomatic of such control is Lewontin's anecdotal observation that "No prominent molecular biologist of my acquaintance is without a financial stake in the biotechnology business." Ziman explains how deeply this new ethos has been inscribed in the practice of scientific research:

...[A]s researchers become more dependent on project grants, the 'Matthew Effect' is enhanced. Competition for real money takes precedence over competition for scientific credibility as the driving force of science. With so many researchers relying completely on research grants or contracts for their personal livelihood, winning these become an end in itself. Research groups are transformed into samll business enterprises. The metaphorical forum of scientific opinion is turned into an actual market in research sciences.

Ziman provides us with a bounty of reasons for thinking deeply about the vulnerability of scientists to "the demands of their paymasters," be they of private provenance or the product of the State's science policy.

Let's shift our attention to topics more explicitly and clearly epistemological and ontological, more theoretical and philosophical, the kind of subject matter that falls typically under the heading of "metascience" and philosophy of science, but is sometimes treated in science studies and history of science as well. Again, we begin with Ziman, here on the nature of "scientific facts:"

It is a philosophical fantasy to suppose that a scientific [or empirical] 'fact' can be freed from the context in which it was observed. That context always contains both 'theoretical' and 'subjective' features, usually closely intertwined. A sophisticated instrument embodies many theoretical concepts. But these are only elaborations and extensions of the theories needed by a trained observer to 'see' what is scientifically significant in her personal experience of the world. And thus it is the case that even the most empirical research findings are saturated with theoretical notions and targeted on specific theoretical issues.

The scientifc facts produced in the natural sciences are not epistemically privileged vis-à-vis the knowledge provided by social scientists or even those working in the humanities. Ziman writes that these fields of intellectual inquiry

[no] doubt...differ enormously in their subject matter, their intellectual objectives, their practical capabilities, and their social and psychic functions. Nevertheless, they belong to the same culture, and operate institutionally under the same ethos. As a consequence, the knowledge produced by the natural sciences is no more 'objective,' and no less 'hermeneutic,' than the knowledge produced by the social, behavioral and other human sciences. In the last analysis, they are all of equal epistemological weight.

As to the theoretical aspect of scientific facts:

"Theories are schematic. They introduce order into representations of experience at the price of obliterating specific facts. " And theories often rely on taxonomy, indeed, the taxonomy itself is suffused with theory:

In metascientific terms, classification, like observation, is a 'theory-laden' activity. It cannot be done entirely without reference to its intellectual and social environment. The resulting scheme always reflects conscious or unconscious influences, such as socially potent metaphors, formal mathematical patterns, the supposed functions of component elements, relationships to unobservable structures , or the need to reconcile conflicting conceptual or practical paradigms.

With Philip Kitcher in Science, Truth and Democracy (2001) and Ronald N. Giere in Science Without Laws (1999), Zyman suggests we view the nature of scientific representation in theories on the order of maps. In Giere's words,

Maps have many of the representational features we need for understanding how scientists represent the world. There is no such thing as a universal map [one reason why Kitcher says we cannot have a 'Theory of Everything,' for an 'ideal atlas is a myth']. Neither does it make sense to question whether a map is true or false. The representational virtues of maps are different. A map may, for example, be more or less accurate, more or less detailed, of smaller or larger scale. Maps require a large background of human convention for their production and use. Without such they are no more than lines on paper. Nevertheless, maps do manage to correspond in various ways with the real world. Their representational powers can be attested by anyone who has used a map when traveling in unfamiliar territory.

The cartographic analogy is central to Giere's notion of a "perspectival realism" that attempts to steer a middle course between (traditional and strongly metaphysical) scientific realism and purely constructivist accounts of science, that is to say, it endeavors to appreciate their relative merits on both epistemological and metaphysical grounds. Kitcher's discussion of "mapping reality" is likewise on behalf of a "modest realism" that wishes to retain the notion (in some measure) of a "mind-independent" reality or robust conception of objectivity while acknowledging such things as the underdetermination of theory by evidence. In Kitcher's words, "There is all the difference between organizing thought and speech, and making reality:...we should not confuse the possibility of constructing representations with that of constructing the world." Or, as Helen Longino puts it, "one can be a realist in the sense of holding that there is a world independently of our thinking that there is one, without being a scientific realist in the sense of holding that the successes of our best theories consists in the world having exactly the features attributed to it by those theories." This is a lesson we might have learned from the history of science if only because, as Nicholas Rescher writes, "we shall ultimately recognize many or most of our current scientific theories to be false and that what we proudly vaunt as scientific knowledge is a tissue of hypotheses--of tentatively adopted contentions many or most of which we will ultimately come to regard needing serious revision or perhaps even abandonment."

Ziman summarizes the scientific significance of the cartographic analogy:

As philosophers and other metascientists are coming to realize, theories are very like maps. Almost every general statement one can make about scientific theories is equally applicable to maps. They are representations of a supposed 'reality.' They are social institutions. They abstract, classify, and simplify numerous 'facts.' They are functional. They require skilled interpretation. And so on. The analogy is evidently much more than a vivid metaphor. In effect, every map is a theory. An analysis of the most commonplace map explores almost all the metascientific features of the most recondite theory. From a naturalistic point of view, the London Underground map exemplifies these features just as well as, say, the 'Standard Model' of particular physics.

Indeed, and much to the chagrin of the old-fashioned scientific realist, "It is clear that scientific maps, models, metaphors, themata and other analogies are not just tools of thought, or figures of speech. They are of the very substance of scientific theory. As sources of meaning and understanding, they stand on an equal footing with explicit verbal and symbolic representations."

To be sure, "perspectival" realism and "modest" realism are still species of realism, yet there is no longer the hard and fast metaphysical commitment to the idea of science as describing things "out there"--objects or not--as they really are or giving us the definitive account of how the world, simply and absolutely, in fact is. Thus Sophie Allen rightly concludes that opponents of conventional scientific realism

do not always--or even usually--count themselves as being sceptics about the existence of the external world, as idealists, phenomenalists or verificationists. Rather, their scepticism is rather more restricted in scope and concerns the existence, or the nature, of the types of entities which the theory postulates or, even more narrowly, what might be called the 'unobservables' postulated by scientific theory. Such entities either do not exist, they claim, or they do not exist entirely mind-independently; that is, they do not exist independently of humans theorizing about them.

Yet another new species of realism (one that has family resemblance to some ideas found in the Mādhyamika school of Buddhism), namely, the "ontic structural realism" of James Ladyman and Don Ross in Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (2007) would have us no longer refer to the unobservables postulated by physics as "objects." In a review of their book, Jeremy Butterfield elaborates:

At first sight, the denial of objects seems mad. Surely no fancy argument from the philosophy of science, or of physics, will convince us that there are no people, trees, or rocks? But of course, our authors are not mad. What they deny is a cluster of views about objects, which they think are not only traditional and false, but still influential and deeply misleading. Besides, they maintain that once we reject these views and think of objects correctly, as some sort of abstraction from a web of relations, we see that people, trees, or rocks--the objects of everyday life and the special sciences--are just as real as the arcane objects of physics: they are all abstractions from webs of relations. So the upshot of their views is rather the opposite of what you might first guess. They do not deny that everyday thought and the special sciences have a subject matter. Rather, they take the lesson from philosophy of science (especially physics)--the lesson that there are no objects, nor intrinsic properties, prior to relations--to liberate everyday thought and the special sciences from the threat of being in some sense secondary to, or derivative from (or 'epiphenomenal' upon) physics. Once we realize that objects are really patterns, each science becomes free to articulate and investigate its own ontology.

We conclude with a few thoughts on the increasing recognition of the sheer folly intrinsic to thinking that the ideal end or goal of the scientific enterprise as such is to provide us with a "Theory of Everything" (TOE). The celebrated Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking was once of the advocates for a naturalistic TOE. However, as John Cottingham informs us,

reflection on Kurt Gödel’s famous incompleteness proof of 1931 has led Hawking to recant. In a more sober assessment he acknowledges that we can never be 'angels who view the universe from the outside,' but instead that both we and our models are 'part of the universe we are describing.' One might therefore expect any scientific theory we produce to be 'either inconsistent, or incomplete.' So in place of his earlier jocular ambition to know 'the mind of God' (i.e. to provide a complete naturalistic theory of the cosmos), Hawking now writes that he is glad he has changed his mind: 'I'm now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end.'

In Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (2000), Nicholas Rescher has come to the same conclusion but for different and long-standing reasons:

The fatal flaw of any purported explanatory theory of everything arises in connection with the ancient paradox of reflectivity and self-substantiation. How can any theory adequately substantiate itself? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? What are we to make of the individual--or the doctrine--that claims, 'I stand ready to vouch for myself?' And how can such self-substantiation be made effective? All the old difficulties of reflexivity and self-reference come to the fore here. No painter can paint a comprehensive picture of a setting that includes this picture itself. And no more, it would seem, can a theorist expound an explanatory account of nature that claims to account satisfactorily for that account itself. For in so far as that account draws on itself, this very circumstance undermines its validity.

In case you missed it...

Logos, a "journal of modern society and culture," has three articles under the heading of "Reflections on Gaza." And over at the International Law Observer, Valentina Azarov introduces us to "[t]wo reports [that] have been recently released by the fact-finding missions posted by the major international NGOs, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) to the Gaza Strip and South Israel following the 22-day war that took place in the region between December 2008 and January 2009:" Gaza Conflict Aftermath: so far “the international community has failed spectacularly”

The Boston Review's latest forum covers Development in Dangerous Places, with the lead essay by Paul Collier followed by responses from a handful of experts on geopolitics and global developement.

At Opino Juris, Roger Alford draws our attention to a post by Marko Milanovic of EJIL: Talk! on the House of Lords' last judgments as the final court of appeal in England and Wales. As you'll see in the comments to Roger's post, yours truly has a few things to say about this as well.

The latest issue of Middle East Report (Summer 2009), No. 251, has made available online an interesting article by one Daud Munir (although I would have liked to have seen some references): "Struggling for the Rule of Law: The Pakistani Lawyers’ Movement." Of course this is a subject that Anil Kalhan has blogged about over at Dorf on Law.

At the blog for Chinese philosophy, Manyul Im is "a bit skeptical" about a proposal touting the potential for Confucianism in contemporary China to lead the struggle for environmental awareness and sustainable development. There's a fairly long comment thread and of course yours truly once again chimes in.

Pardo and Patterson's latest article against the current in contemporary philosophy of mind (forthcoming in Neuroethics) is available at SSRN: "Minds, Brains, and Norms."

The tireless Frank Pasquale writes on "What the Media Isn't Covering in the Health Reform Debate--And Why It Matters."

And at The Faculty Lounge, Tim Zinnecker is troubled by the fact that over one billion people a day on our planet go hungry: Food for Thought.

Haider Ala Hamoudi shares his thoughts on "Women in the New Iraq" at his blog, Islamic Law in Our Times.

Lisa R. Pruitt explores "a law that's all about rural women" in her post at the Legal Ruralism blog ('a little [legal] realism about the rural').

Finally, C.A.J. (Tony) Coady, author most recently of Morality and Political Violence (2007) and Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics (2009), has penned the entry on "The Problem of Dirty Hands" for the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I'm especially pleased to see this entry because it is one I recommended to the editors several years ago (actually, in 2004!) and the subject editor, Thomas Pogge, agreed to it, as well as to my suggestion that Coady be its author.

Health Insurance Industry and Health Care Reform

In today's Times, Michael Hiltzik provides us with a succinct account of the shenanigans if not machinations of the health insurance industry as it fights to gut meaningful health care reform in this country:

[I]f the insurers have proved anything over the last 15 years as the health crisis has gathered speed like an avalanche roaring downhill, it's that they're part of the problem, not the solution.

The firms take billions of dollars out of the U.S. healthcare wallet as profits, while imposing enormous administrative costs on doctors, hospitals, employers and patients. They've introduced complexity into the system at every level. Your doctor has to fight them to get approval for the treatment he or she thinks is best for you. Your hospital has to fight them for approval for every day you're laid up. Then they have to fight them to get their bills paid, and you do too.

One Wendell Potter reminded a Senate committee in June that health insurance executives had assured Congress in 1993 that they would work to secure universal medical coverage and end denials of coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Then they moved heaven and earth to kill reform.

They've made the same promises now, Potter observed. But they're in an even better position to throttle reform. Mergers and acquisitions have turned the industry into a cartel of huge corporations.

"The industry is bigger, richer and stronger, and it has a much tighter grip on our healthcare system," he said. The last thing they want is a government program set up as their competition.

Potter knows the insurers' ways because he was a top executive in the industry for 20 years. But the hard numbers bear him out. The two largest insurers, WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group, each acquired 11 other insurers between 2000 and 2007. They now control a total of 67 million "covered lives" (that's customers in health insurance-speak).

This consolidation has produced functional monopolies in communities across America. The American Medical Assn. (itself no great fan of reform) found in a 2007 survey that in 76% of the country, defined as its major metropolitan statistical areas, one insurer had a share of 50% or more of the conventional insurance market. This phenomenon gives the companies enormous power to drive up premiums and maximize profits. [....]

You've heard of the Blue Dog Democrats, those mostly rural conservatives who blocked a summertime vote on reform legislation on Capitol Hill? According to the Center for Public Integrity, the biggest backer of the Blue Dogs’ political action committee is the healthcare industry, which is on the path to pumping a total of $1.2 million into the PAC's maw in the current 2009-10 election cycle.

Then there's the advocacy group called the Campaign for an American Solution, which describes itself as "a grass-roots effort . . . to build support for workable healthcare reform." The organization owns up to being an "initiative" of America’s Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, the industry's chief lobbying arm. Unless I've missed a radical change in lawn and garden horticulture, you can't get much further from the grass roots than to be a creation of the industry with the biggest stake in the debate. [....]

Please read the whole article.

Addendum: "A Canadian doctor diagnoses U.S. healthcare," that is to say, a "caricature of 'socialized medicine' is used by corporate interests to confuse Americans and maintain their bottom lines instead of patients' health" (also in today's Times).