Craig Stoltz is a web consultant working in the health
2.0 space. He has previously served as health editor for the Washington Post and editorial director of Revolution Health. He blogs at Web 2.0 … Oh really? I recently had a hand in a project, called the Healthcare08
PoliGraph
, which seeks to find meaningful
distinctions among the presidential
candidates’ healthcare policies. This was tougher than it sounds.
This being the primary season, each party’s contenders are pretty
much sticking with the approved script. The Democrats are trying to outbid each
other for cradle-to-grave healthcare for all humans treading on U.S. soil. The
Republicans are quietly uttering free-market shibboleths to avoid alienating
their big contributors until the fall, when they’ll probably have to promise to
do something or other.
The PoliGraph project plotted each candidate’s stances on
six healthcare issues on big graphics. We plotted their positions along two
axes: from left (i.e., federalphilic) to right (federalphobic), and from most
important to least important (to the candidate, not us).
By parsing the data carefully, we were able to find some
daylight between candidates, even within each party’s tight ideological clusters.
For instance, for all the fuss over comparing Clinton’s and
Edwards’s personal “mandates” that
people have insurance, when we dug into her plan we found her solutions more inclusive
of market forces than either Edwards’ or Obama’s. (This gets wonkish, but Hillary
gives small businesses incentives to
offer private insurance coverage to employees; Edwards and Obama depend more on mandates and
expanding public programs to fill that gap. Hey, it’s something.)