Bechdolt (congrats on being the first commenter in the class, by the way) suggests that the polling results I referred to in the last post may be consistent, and suggests two ways the problems these polling results imply might be remedied. If I understand, the ideas are, essentially (a) make the health care reform proposals clearer to the US population to prevent mis-information, and (b) present a new plan that everyone agrees with.
Folks, speaking of mis-information, if I misrepresent your ideas here, please correct me in the comments--I'll do my best, but I might not get it right every time.
I want to push back on this comment a bit. I don't disagree that mis-information plays a large role in the health care debate, but I wonder if it's possible to have accurate and up-to-date information on the ongoing health care reform process out there, given that (a) nothing has been passed yet, and the bills in congress are in flux, and will be until a final bill is approved by both houses, (b) multiple proposals are being floated, and (c) nobody has an incentive to accurately describe the likely results of any legislative proposal.
Essentially, with respect to the third option, people who are in favor of a health care reform have an incentive to make it look better than it really is, and people who are against it have an incentive to make it look worse. This is a lot easier to do, given that we can't really anticipate with precision the exact results of any given reform. So it's easy to put forth a best-case or worst-case scenario and describe it as The Truth.
So who's going to put out accurate information about what the best-case outcome should be?
7 comments:
I wanted to comment further on the mis-information/mis-representation thread. I agree that because the bills are still fluctuating and new proposals are being presented play a large role in confusing the American people about healthcare, but I think that the more important issue is that, like you said, nobody has any incentive whatsoever to provide accurate information. If we could just get a reliable stream of information from one or two unbiased sources set up specifically for that purpose alone, the healthcare debate would see a huge influx of knowledgeable input and a large decrease in erroneous rumors and falsehoods. This would give the public a foundation to stand on, which right now is really missing due to bias, sponsorship, favoritism bad journalism and a myriad of other factors that are obscuring the American public's view of what is really happening. If a system like this were in place then at least people could disagree based on accurate information and attack each other with informed logical arguments instead of angry hearsay.
Who can put out accurate information on healthcare reform? We need someone who is perfectly informed, completely objective, and who can predict the future! The best we can do is to not take anything we hear at face value and to think critically. Anyone reporting information is bound to have some sort of bias even if he or she is trying to be objective. Personally, I don't feel even close to being qualified to form an opinion regarding what should be done about healthcare, so I refrain from doing so. If and when the time comes to vote on it, I would have a lot of research to do. I doubt that the average citizen does nearly enough of his or her own research.
When I was referring to one or two sources of information, I didn't mean individuals. I meant a board, coalition, committee or some other type of peer reviewed vetting process for information on a topic to topic basis that might work better than what is going on now. My thought was that this might allow individuals who, like you and to some extent me, feel unqualified and uninformed enough to have an intelligent research based opinion on topics like healthcare reform. Nobody has time to do the amount of research it takes to keep up to date even if they wanted to. And I agree that even this kind of idea would have biases, but there are ways to limit them that are already used, such as balancing the members of the committee evenly between party affiliation, having multiple experts from different disciplines for consultation, public representation etc. If we wait, like you suggest, until it is time to vote to do the research necessary there will be a large portion of the population that will simply give up caring. Any effort to keep that from happening in my mind is worth a shot, even if it is on the idealistic side of things.
I don’t know if any source can be completely objective. Last semester while abroad in Australia, I read an article about how the success of advocacy groups was linked to the way they were portrayed in the media, which was largely biased. The information about the issue the advocacy groups were painted with the bias of whatever source was reporting about them, the contradicting or mis-information due to the bias (which was largely due to advertisements that were crucial to keeping the media source afloat) lead to confusion of the public, who became frustrated and confused with the issue often causing them to lose interest and support for the issue. I agree that an unbiased system of information about the healthcare reform would be ideal but could it attainable before its time to vote? And would it remain unbiased and accurate? Another case I’m thinking of is the IPPC report which took along time to compile and by the time it was published some information was outdated and changed. I agree if we wait for information until its time to vote, a lot of people may lose interest in critically thinking about and filtering through the information.
Health care reform may possibly one of the most heated topics on our agenda today, however, there's (as the article says) all talk and no serious action. It seems like it shouldn't be so difficult when there are primarily two health insurance plans to choose from, socialized medicine and government-run, though, things get tricky when we consider the many actors on this stage, fighting only for themselves. While, Insurance industries, the pharmaceutical industries and the health care industries fight to protect their profits and congress takes money from them to create new health bills, the interest of the public suddenly becomes of miniscule influence. So as most try to push for a government-run insurance plan, many others still stand pulling the rope in the other direction. As a result of such selfish and greedy players in the health care reform process, where everyone wants to win, any true facts behind the issue are easily pushed away.
I completely agree that any information going through traditional communication mediums is going to be heavily biased. But why not take advantage of the huge amount of technology options we have at our disposal as a society. We don't have to disseminate the information through Fox news, of CNN. The government could set up a non-profit web site, or something to that effect. Our society should be taking full advantage of options like that instead of thinking that the only way to get information to the public is through biased sources like the news.
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