The Slippery Slope for Health Care's Slippery Slope Opposition

Richard Thaler:

Slippery-Slope Logic, Applied to Health Care, by Richard Thaler, Commentary, NY Times: There are lots of important things to worry about these day... So it is important that we limit our worries to real as opposed to imaginary risks.

One pernicious category of imaginary risks involves ... dreaded “slippery slope” arguments. Such arguments are dangerous because they are popular, versatile and often convincing, yet completely fallacious. Worse, they are creeping into ... the Supreme Court ... deliberations on health care reform.

There is a DirecTV ad that humorously illustrates the basic form of the slippery-slope argument. A foreboding announcer intones a list of syllogisms that are enacted on screen: “When your cable company puts you on hold, you get angry. When you get angry, you go blow off steam. When you go blow off steam, accidents happen.” Later, we reach the finale: “You wake up in a roadside ditch. Don’t wake up in a roadside ditch.” ... The idea is that while Policy X may be acceptable, it will inevitably lead to the terrible Outcome Y... The problem is that such arguments are often made without any evidence that doing X makes Y more likely, much less inevitable. ...

Given how flimsy slippery-slope arguments can be, it is downright scary that they might play an important role in the Supreme Court decision on ... whether it is constitutional for the federal government to penalize people who fail to buy health insurance. ...

Consider these now-famous comments about broccoli from Justice Antonin G. Scalia during the oral arguments. “Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food,” he said. “Therefore, everybody is in the market. Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.” Showing remarkable restraint, he did not mention anything about ending up in a roadside ditch. ...

Please stop! The very fact that a slippery slope is being cited as grounds for declaring the law unconstitutional ... tells you all that you need to know about the argument’s validity. Can anyone imagine Congress passing a broccoli mandate law, much less the court allowing it to take effect? ... Surely, the justices have the conceptual resources to draw a distinction between the health care market and the market for broccoli. And even if they don’t, then all the briefs, the zillions of blog posts and a generation’s worth of economic literature can help them.

More generally, we would be better off as a society if we could collectively agree to ignore all slippery-slope arguments that aren’t accompanied by evidence that said slope exists. ...