e-Health Care Reform, e-Inclusion?

McClatchy Newspapers recently examined the Obama Web based initiatives and asked whether they are “real or smoke?”

In what has been hailed by many as a revolutionary concept in governance, the Obama team has requested input from The People—via the web. In addition to calls for personal stories of economic crisis, “concerns and hopes,” and a call for administration job applications, the Obama team has asked for suggestions to improve health care. The response is said thus far to be staggering, with emails virtually flooding the change.gov site. The People have spoken; the question is, McClatchey states, “is anybody listening?”

"‘We have an incredible group of volunteers who read through the essays with a goal of reading through all of them if possible," e-mailed Jen Psaki, an Obama transition press aide.’” Thus far, the McClatchey article states “A few submissions have been singled out on change.gov, including suggestions for health-care restructuring. They may not be yielding much new insight, however. While Daschle hailed all three in a YouTube video posted on change.gov as "fantastic ideas from the American public," two — preventive medicine and cost containment — have been major topics in the health-care debate for years. The third idea, a Peace Corps-like Health Service Corps, already appears elsewhere on change.gov as an Obama proposal.”

In addition, the article notes that “two of the three health-care ideas that Tom Daschle lauded from more than 3,700 responses came from the first of 59 pages of suggestions. The primary means of ordering the responses on the site is through a “thumbs up, thumbs down,” approval/disapproval system—with those responses which have garnered the greatest amounts of approval appearing first on the page. This “can lead to what Lillian Lee, a language-processing researcher, calls a ‘rich get richer’ bias.” The process is somewhat akin to the “google-graveyard.”

"High-ranked posts are put at the top of the page so that lower-ranked posts are never seen in order to be rated in the first place," explained Lee, who teaches computer science at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

In a final note, the article points out something that may well have warranted an entirely separate post: Not everyone uses the internet.

“According to a survey in May by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 41 percent of non-Hispanic blacks don't use the Internet. Nor do 65 percent of people older than 65. A third of rural residents and more than half of Americans who never finished high school don't use the Internet either.”
Read full article here.