The grassy side of health care reform

I’ve been doing some reading about the history of healthcare reform in the US. It was interesting to see how there are parallels between what’s happened before in history of this reform and what’s happening now. In the early 1900s when reform efforts were just beginning, reform seemed to fail due to lack of popular support. Reformers seemed to focus on appeasing doctors and special interest groups and they didn’t focus a lot of attention on promoting plans to the general public. Consequently the public was left feeling like the plans that were created wouldn’t really help them.

In fact opposition groups appeared to be better at reaching out to the community to oppose reform and rally support around opposing reform. The authors of the article argued that if grass roots level support had been mobilized around healthcare reform then perhaps some reform efforts would be successful. As it stands, reform efforts to date, have created plans that were very complicated which made it difficult for the average person to understand. Special interest groups and policymakers that were against reform were able to use this to their advantage in mobilizing support against reform.

It seems like the same things are happening again today. The most recent healthcare reform legislation that has been proposed is largely complex and as before, a strong grass roots movement has developed that has raised a large amount of public support for crushing rather than encouraging reform. To be fair, Obama has sent out e-mails and made speeches but somehow it hasn’t been enough. I look back the “town hall meetings” that were held by legislators in their districts and they didn’t seem to accomplish much except get people angrier, but what they did accomplish was to get people against the bill. I know the Obama administration did make attempts to reach out to the public for support but it wasn’t enough and the opposition used this to mobilize the public against reform.

I wish more had been done to explain the bill at the beginning, when it was first introduced. I’m not sure what could be done to encourage grass roots support for the bill now. Its so interesting that Obama’s grass roots effort to get him elected and now a grass roots effort almost brought down this health care reform.

Source: Hoffman, B. (2003) Health care reform and social movements in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 93 , 75-85.