A tribal battle over health insurance portability

In 1990, linguist Deborah Tannen made a splash with You Just Don't Understand, a study suggesting that men and women speak fundamentally different languages, informed by different values, and so often talk past each other.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated something similar with liberals and conservatives: they march to different moral drummers and so make very different ethical judgments about what government and community owe to the individual and vice versa. In a 2012 op-ed, Haidt described liberal and conservative value schemes as different tribal affinities defined by different sacred objects -- for liberals, "formerly victimized groups," for conservatives, "God and country." The villains are all symmetric: elite oppression vs. intrusive and redistributive government. More on Haidt's schema below.

I thought of Haidt's contrasting value systems while reading a Washington Post profile of two people who have left jobs because the ACA made health insurance outside the workplace available to them.