"The More We Verify It, the More Truth it Is:” Producing the Truth in Health-Policy Debates

Based upon the case study of the debate when the Czech government imposed a forced administration in the General Health Insurance Fund (VZP) between 2005 and 2006, we analyse how involved parties used rhetorical resources to account for truth and reality. The General Health Insurance Fund is the biggest insurance fund in the Czech Republic and represents a crucial actor in the Czech health policy. This case has been one of the most serious institutional crisis in the Czech health policy in last two decades. Employed qualitative analysis of 38 TV debates we put emphasis on how the parties negotiate accountability, credibility and truth. Departing from ethnomethodological tradition in sociology and discursive psychology, the paper aims to identify the discursive and rhetorical resources (Edwards and Potter, 1992; Potter, 1996) used by the involved parties to manage what is at stake in the debate, to maintain their credibility and legitimacy and to manage factuality in the policy debate. Drawing on the discursive action model of description and attribution (Edwards and Potter 1992) we focus on (1) how accounts are produced as credible and factual, (2) what is ‘at stake’ in the debate and (3) what are policy consequences of it. The paper aims to contribute to understanding how the truth and policy realities are discursively and dialogical co-produced in a particular social context. Last but not least, the paper intends to introduce ethnomethodology and discursive psychology to the field of interpretative policy analysis and test its relevance for understanding of recent public policy debates.