The Raging Debate

Like last year’s effort where we successfully predicted the President Obama’s victory in the 2008 Presidential Election, we’ll be examining the rapidly changing debate on Health Care. Unlike last year we can’t predict a clear winner (100 people in the Senate will do that), but we can highlight the solutions most favored by the people and track the changing nature of the discussion.

Each Wednesday for the next several weeks, we’ll be breaking down the previous week’s discussion to provide insights on the winners and losers in the raging debate on health care.

2X INCREASE IN HEALTH CARE DISCUSSION

MONTHLY POSTS - HEALTH CARE AND INSURANCE

Even before, the President began to focus his domestic agenda on plans to reform health care, health care and insurance showed significant discussion online, generating 60,000 posts a month in our dataset.

For this study we have pulled data from more than 100 health and political forums and blogs, representing more than 2,000,000 posts and 110,000 people in the average month. Some of the top sites by volume include: webmd, dailystrength, arguewitheveryone, topix, and politicalforum.

Since the public debate began the volume of discussion has increased remarkably to more than 120,000 posts a month.

SINGLE PAYER LEADS AS THE POLICY CHOICE

REFORM OPTIONS - PARTICIPATION & ADVOCACY

Participation and Advocacy Framework shows how many people are participating in discussion about an idea or brand versus the number of people advocating the brand. The efficiency line shows the average ratio of advocates to participants across topics.

We applied our advocacy framework to understand the changing preferences of the American Public on the primary key proposals (as we understand them today). This participation/advocacy map of the current options shows that single payer options have a significant lead over private insurance based options.

Medical co-ops while showing some participation, are showing very little advocacy online. Private Insurance based options have a strong advocacy base, which backers will need to build in order to win the debate.

It's important to note that there is a strong, groundswell of people in the "do nothing" camp, while they are not advocating for a specific proposal they are actively advocating against any of the proposals. As the actual policy choices become more distinct [although that would defy the current trend] we will quantify those for and against the final proposal.

DISCUSSION ON RATIONING SHOWS THE BIGGEST INCREASE

REFORM DRIVERS & CONCERNS

Breaking down the health care discussion into key drivers/concerns about reform shows how the topic landscape has changed from June through August.

Rationing shows the largest increase in discussion as people's concerns about rationing in their current medicare coverage take center stage. High cost stayed relatively flat while nearly all the other rational drivers of health care increased.

Even the relatively undiscussed issue of portability shows a significant increase in discussion. Perhaps as many have been suggesting, a more rational debate on health care is now taking place.

EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE

Emotion map shows the percentage of conversation evidencing key emotions based on more than 1,000 phrases and words expressing emotions across 12 categories.

Using our emotional mapping tools we're able to look at the emotional content of messages and visualize the decreasing emotion in conversation from June to August.

While much of the decrease is in the positive emotions, worry also declined as people recognized health care reform would not be rushed through congress. The decrease in the emotional nature of the discussion is a good thing for what are very important (and expensive) policy choices.

Anger and Happy were the only 2 emotions showing increasing prevalence in discussion. With health care being such a hot button topic anger is evidenced from all sides of the debate, while happiness increased surprisingly due to the new more measured pace of debate as people feel reform is not being pushed on them.

TREATMENTS MOST HIGHLY CORRELATED WITH HIGH COST

Our final data point breaks down the words most commonly associated with high cost discussion. We've categorized the words into thematic groups of: treatments, payment methods, doctors / patients and the uninsured.

It's interesting to note the correlation of words around the high cost of treatment, which none of the health care plans as we understand them really address. Discussions of high cost are not strongly linked with uninsured, showing that high cost and covering the uninsured while the 2 most important rational drivers of reform are not highly correlated.

See the next post "You Lie!"