By Holly Hayes
Richard J. Webb, a guest-blogger on Disputing and author of the Healthcare Neutral ADR Blog, featured last week an excellent post on how the health care reform debate would look if it was mediated. Here is an excerpt:
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Leaving aside all of the ways in which the healthcare reform debate does not resemble the setting required for effective mediation, I began to imagine what I would do if thrust into a room with a commitment from both sides to mediate in good faith. Having reviewed the parties’ respective positions on numerous, individual proposals for reform, I first thought that there must be a way to parse and compromise among these proposals to reach a mutually acceptable outcome. But the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that such an effort would fail. I had an intuitive sense of why it would fail, but I struggled to explain that result in terms familiar to traditional mediation theory. In fact, I started a blog post on this subject, but put it aside, unfinished.
Shortly after that, I read a description of the Frank Sander Lecture to be given by Professor Lawrence Susskind as the opening plenary of the ABA Dispute Resolution Section’s Annual Spring Conference on April 8th: “Values and Identity Conflicts: Proposing a New Dispute Resolution Doctrine.” The summary, which appears in the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution’s February Just Resolutions Enews (members only), turned on the light bulb in my head.
Read the full post here.
We appreciate Mr. Webb sharing his “light bulb” moment and welcome your comments
on how the health care reform might look if it was mediated.
