Open government: Obama health care team responds to citizen feedback

December 2, 2008 | Eric Eldon

Last week, President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team asked people to share their ideas about how to improve health care policy in the U.S. More than 3,500 people have responded. It turns out that Obama’s health care policy team really was paying attention. Today, incoming Secretary for Health and Human Services Tom Daschle and the team respond, saying they’ve been busy reading the comments and drawing ideas from them.

In the video above, they point to commenters who suggest a focus on preventative health care, the need for a sort of “health corp” like the Peace Corp but to place young doctors in communities, and ways of managing costs.

This is another incremental step in using the web to make government more open, a goal of the Obama administration, and it’s not especially substantive. A more compelling use of this feedback mechanism would be some sort of user voting or recommendation system to highlight ideas that gain popular grassroots support.

The new administration hasn’t even taken office, though, so these early steps are a good sign that the web will become more central to governance in this country.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He writes and edits stories about lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a now-failed startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers.

  • Just by your comments, you clearly don't understand the business aspect of healthcare. A "health corp" programme is so unrealistic, it's laughable to know that someone with zero real healthcare industry experience is now leading the government's efforts on reform.
  • Mark, um, not sure if you meant to direct that comment at me or at Tom Daschle. I didn't endorse the "health corp" program, I just said that Daschle and his team had mentioned it in the video.
  • With respect, the comments are directed to anyone who thinks the healthcare reform initiatives presented so far and the people that are being put in charge of the effort, will be effective. Not meaning to shoot the messenger, but I hardly give their team credit for using YouTube to talk about an insane health policy agenda.
  • Thanks, Mark. I can only respond by saying that you should tell them why they're wrong on Change.gov. Hopefully they'll continue developing a method for receiving feedback that gives your criticisms airtime. Such a back-and-forth process is what open government _should_ be about, after all. Not just preaching to the choir.
  • Andrew
    Unfortunately, popular grassroots consensus and "common sense" is frequently dead wrong on a number of issues, not that government policy is much better in most cases, so I am not sure that this will help much. A mob of ill-informed people does not lend authority to their argument by virtue of being a mob.

    To use an example from up above, Americans already get more preventative healthcare than their European counterparts (per the medical literature on the subject), and in the healthcare economics literature it is widely considered to be one of the biggest sources of waste in the American systems since, counterintuitively to many people, most preventative healthcare costs a lot more money than it saves outside of a few diagnostic procedures and the usual array of vaccinations. People want more "preventative healthcare", not realizing that they already get more than is useful and that it is a major source of healthcare spending waste.
  • Andrew, you're certainly right that the majority can be wrong. The point of democracy is that by having an open debate, the best ideas can be discovered, debated and ultimately implemented.

    As the Churchill quote goes:

    "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

    You may be right about some forms of preventative care being a waste of money. My personal form of preventative care -- trying to exercise regularly, sleep a reasonable amount and eat at least somewhat healthy food -- seems to work pretty good. That's probably not what you mean, though :)
  • Is this a dream? Or did the government actually listen to the people for once and come back to them with an answer. WOW!