Politics & Power Quote by Steve Buyer

Buyer’s language is the velvet glove over a very familiar fist: procedural governance deployed as a moral emergency. He opens with “sincere hope” and “strive for excellence,” the kind of civic piety that reads as unassailable. Who could be against excellence in medical care? That’s the point. By establishing himself as the reasonable guardian of quality, he inoculates the statement against the charge that what follows is simply partisan obstruction or industry protection.

Then the pivot: “This proposed rule will be harmful.” The sentence is deliberately broad, almost frictionless. No agency is named, no mechanism explained, no tradeoff acknowledged. Harm is asserted as a self-evident outcome, and the audience is invited to fill in the blanks with the most vivid image available: a community trying to modernize a hospital and being stopped by faceless regulators. “Communities who wish to upgrade their medical facilities” is key framing. It casts the conflict not as hospitals versus regulators, or cost-control versus expansion, but local aspiration versus bureaucratic interference.

Contextually, this is classic health-policy politics, where “rules” often refer to certificate-of-need restrictions, reimbursement regulations, or facility standards that can slow construction and raise compliance costs. Buyer’s intent is to make the policy debate legible in the simplest moral terms: progress is being blocked. The subtext is an appeal to local autonomy and economic development (upgraded facilities mean jobs, investment, prestige), while sidestepping the argument regulators usually make: that unconstrained expansion can drive up healthcare spending and duplicate services. The quote works because it turns a technical fight into a story about communities being denied care they believe they’ve earned.