Future Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle has made a request: He wants Americans to discuss health care policy between December 15 and 31, then report their conclusions back to the Obama transition team.
If you look at the web pages announcing this project, they suggest these discussions should be solely in-person, rather than online. I propose ignoring that in-the-flesh insistence as a rare Obama cyber-screwup, because online discussion has several major advantages.
- People with similar careers – and therefore similar work situations and expertise – can more easily join together online.
- Online discussions are automatically memorialized, which supports another Obama/Daschle-team goal (they ask for feedback, both in ideas and in the kind of “I need this problem solved so badly!” stories politicians feast on).
- Some people are just in the habit of doing their group discussions online these days.
- Foreigners – who have a lot of experience with alternative systems to those in the US – can much more easily join in online than in American living rooms.
I think there are three sets of health care issues on which techies can offer special perspective:
- Health care for entrepreneurs and contractors (as opposed to people with ordinary jobs).
- Electronic healthcare records and related systems.
- Personalized medicine (which will be driven very much by Moore’s Law).
I’ve seeded the discussion with blog posts on each of those, and I very much encourage you to join in the discussion via their comment threads.
I further encourage you to start similar online discussions in any other venue you frequent. For example, I plan to do so on the “Off-Topic” boards on several sports forums I frequent. You can link back to this post if you like.
Above all, I encourage you to submit feedback to the Obama Transition Team no later than very early in January, using the simple web page they’ve set up for the purpose. My suggested format is to summarize a particular online discussion – whether or not you think somebody else is submitting a summary of the same one! Definitely paste in the URL of the whole blog post or forum thread, and perhaps also of the specific comments you think they’ll be most interested in.
The page linked to above requests — but thankfully does not require — answers to three multiple-choice survey questions. It’s up to you whether you think they’re worth running with. I only like the first one, so I’ll post it here and invite comments.
1. What do you perceive is the biggest problem in the health system?
a. Cost of health insurance
b. Cost of health care services
c. Difficulty finding health insurance due to a pre-existing condition
d. Lack of emphasis on prevention
e. Quality
f. Other (Please explain)
Related links
- Washington doesn’t understand the magnitude of the Federal IT crisis
- Does HP offer a lesson for US Federal IT?
- Seven IT priorities for the Obama Administration
What do you think about health care in the US? Please post your comments here, or submit them directly to http://www.change.gov!
