Making Sense of the Presidential Healthcare Platforms

Posted on | February 13, 2008 | Comments Off on Making Sense of the Presidential Healthcare Platforms

One plot that may make a differenceIf you’re like me, you’ve read and possibly reread summaries of the Presidential candidates healthcare platforms, and you’re still confused. Where do the candidates really stand? And how close do their positions approximate yours?

A healthcare site, Healthcentral.com, puts the candidates’ positions on a grid and allows you to plot your stance on healthcare issues in relationship to the candidates’ positions. The PoliGraph summarizes candidates’ positions on healthcare reform, the uninsured, drug prices, prevention, technology and stem cells.

A grid on the site places the candidates on an “X” axis defined as “Government Driven” and a “Y” axis that plots the importance of each particular issue to the various candidates.

Not surprisingly in the arena of healthcare reform, Obama and Clinton are left of center with their reliance on government-driven programs, while Paul is farthest to the right on the market-driven scale with McCain and Huckabee closer to the center.

What I like best about the site is that it utilizes the interactive ability of the Web to make arcane distinctions obvious to the user. One graphic can say more than 200 words of text.

Joy Buchanan, a content producer with Healthcentral.com, wrote in an email that the site’s producers wanted Web visitors to “see if their views were similar to many other people like them… We also thought people would be surprised to see that maybe they didn’t match their favorite candidates as much as they thought!”

Several producers at Healthcentral.com collated material primarily from candidates’ Websites, but also reviewed white papers, press releases, videos, blog entries, debate transcripts, news articles (from publications like the The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune), voting records and even candidate-sponsored commercials on YouTube. The producers then assigned numerical values to each candidate’s position on a host of issues.

“On Drug Prices, for example, importing drugs from other countries would have scored a -2 [on the X-axis], while completely forbidding foreign drug importation scored a 2,” Buchanan wrote. “The average of the sub-issue scores became the score for the overall issue.“

“On the importance scale, or Y-axis, we measured how prominently the candidates discussed this issue — was it prominent on their Web sites? Did they vote on legislation? Did they discuss it in interviews? — and how often. The more they talked about it, the higher the score. If there were few or no public record of them discussing an issue, the lower they scored,” she wrote.

“Candidates who ‘flip-flopped’ or reversed their stance scored in the middle.”

Buchanan noted that her biggest surprise was “how far to the left some of the Republican candidates fell on certain issues. For example, McCain, Romney and Giuliani… [the latter two are no longer running] were further left on stem cells and drug prices than any other Republicans. However, no Democrats appeared on the conservative side of the graph for any issue.”

In all, six people worked on the site, according to Buchanan. Craig Stoltz, former health editor for The Washington Post, was the project director. Jack Kustanowitz led the technology team. Buchanan was part of the content team along with Mary Katherine Stump. Zachary Gavin created the Flash tools that graphically displayed the candidates’ positions. Val Ruland-Schwartz was the designer. Healthcentral.com took three months to compile all the information, create the tool and launch the site.

The biggest change to the site in the last month has been the deletion of various candidates as they drop out of the race. The site has not aggregated the positions plotted by visitors to the site, although Healthcentral.com may do that in the future, Buchanan wrote.

(Tom Linden, MD, is a professor of medical journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He can be reached at [email protected]. Opinions expressed by Health Commentary guest bloggers do not necessarily represent the views of Health Commentary.)