Free Health Talk

While the big dogs: Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin and Chris Brogan talk about information being free, top notch discussion by the way, I wanted to talk about President Obama’s Health Care Reform Town Hall that I participated in this afternoon, #WHCCQ. The concept of it was really cool, but politics aside, can bringing people together on Twitter lead to an answer to our current health care reform questions?

It would be cool if it could…

(Disclaimer: I work for Humana, a Health Insurance Company, and the ramblings below are my own, not too thoroughly constructed thoughts, and not those of my current employer)

Either Or

I find what is going on with politics and social media to be particularly interesting because, in politics, you usually have one side of an issue polarized against it’s adversary, the opposite side. There can be some middle ground, I guess, but for the most part you’re either pro or anti. That either or relationship is binary, and binary relationships traditionally do not leave much room for open discussion.

Enter social media… A medium that promotes open discussion. A medium that requires people to listen in order to engage.

It’s as if the President has pitted the proverbial unstoppable force (social media) against the proverbial immovable object (political ideologies) and I’m wondering how this party is going to end with everybody dancing together.

Here’s why: when you ask everyone for their opinion, you get everyone’s opinion. Including the misinformed opinions, the angry opinions, the angry misinformed opinions, the pompous opinions, and finally the good opinions. How do the good opinions rise to the top so that a real conversation can take place, pros and cons can be vetted, and a real solution can be executed upon?

That’s the question.

Next Steps?

Is Twitter the answer? I think that the jury is still deliberating. I saw a lot of positive feedback about the concept, today, but I threw some questions out there, received some responses, and don’t really expect much to come of it. Health care is a complex system. What was eye-opening about the health care reform discussion on-line is how simplistic the answer has become for a lot of people: health care should be free…

I generally think that crowdsourcing opinions is a good idea. And if the point of today was to engage a large number of people to care about an important issue, then that’s totally cool. But at the end of the day a decision is going to need to be made, one way or the other. After that decision is made, at least one side is not going to be happy with the outcome.

That’s really interesting to me. What happens to the regular people who engage in this debate after they are listened to, but not sided with?

Do they continue to engage in the future? Or not? Will the fact that they were heard outweigh any negativity associated with the outcome not going their way? And ultimately: can the way we tackle health care reform, by utilizing social media to listen and engage, revolutionize the way we are governed?

I’m looking forward finding out, and wonder what you think.