Health Care: What’s on Bloggers Minds, the Candidates and their Platforms?

Posted by Bill Pierce

When you listen to Senator Obama speak on the campaign trail about health care, the uninsured and universal coverage are front and center.  The same was true for Senators Kennedy and Clinton in their convention speeches.  Yet when you look at the Democratic platform you get a much richer, broader and nuanced discussion that focuses on costs, quality and coverage.  If you read The Wall Street Journal’s most recent online discussion moderated by Laura Meckler between the two candidate’s chief health care advisors you come away with a much more nuanced and broad discussion about reform.  

It’s also interesting to note that on the blogs the focus varies widely.  The political blogs generally do not mention health care, whether it is coverage or costs despite the fact the candidates are talking more and more about health care including Senator McCain.  Only the Political Moms talk about health care but it’s usually just using the very general phrase of health care with no other references.

On the health policy blogs, as would be expected, the discussion is broader including costs and health care, but no or rare mentions of the uninsured or universal coverage.  The doctors are similar in that they do focus on health care, but in what I think continues to be interesting and telling, no mention of costs.  As I wrote before, physicians are at the heart of the cost issue, and when the question was about Medicare reimbursement for physicians and whether they would get an increase or decrease, they were very interested and chatty.  But that has past and now nothing.

So this is interesting — on the campaign trail and at the conventions, the uninsured and universal coverage rule.  In the blogosphere it’s about heath care in general with some discussion of costs, but nothing on coverage (or rarely).  But as noted in my last post, far and away voters (Kaiser Family Foundation poll: Kaiser Health Tracking Poll:  Election 2008) are interested in costs, and I would venture to say concerned about the issue.  Will the two trends merge?