Citizen Knowledge in the Health Care Reform Debates

This week’s readings, for the most part, expressed serious doubts about the capacity for citizens to consume and evaluate accurate political information. I imagine no one was particularly surprised about these claims: it seems someone is always mocking Americans’ ignorance about both domestic as well as international politics. Several authors discuss specific political information, including Kuklinski and Quirk who speak primarily about knowledge of welfare. However, a more current political issue that prompted citizen involvement and awareness might be health care reform. The health care debates that spanned much of last year would have been a fantastic case to use in order to evaluate the ways political issues are disseminated and subsequently understood by the mass American public.

In many ways, these debates about the drafting and ultimate passage of health care reform demonstrated some of the points this week’s authors make. Health care reform affected millions of Americans and therefore is an issue that complements the ideal of an informed citizen who is well-aware of how such a public policy might impact them and her community. These theorists and authors may have been happy to see so many “ordinary citizens” taking interest in policy. But understanding the many nuances and particularities and difficult legal language of the Bill was an immense task that begs questions about how these “ordinary” Americans learned about the its contents.

News media was definitely a prominent source and these debates speak to the responsibility of news organizations to take it upon themselves to interpret, synthesize and convey the most important pieces of the bill and how it would affect citizens. As our authors told us, average citizens cannot be expected – even biologically- to fully inform themselves. Thus, news broadcasts, print publications as well as non-traditional blogs, dissected the bill and summarized its contents and their consequences. While this seemed to occur across news media, one wonders the extent to which citizens actively sought out this information in order to decide if the bill would benefit them, or if they simply acted emotionally based on smaller – and perhaps less significant types – of information.

The heuristic model, which Delli Carpini investigates and others follow up on, was definitely at work as many of the protests led by citizens rallied around single issues that were likely misrepresentative of the bill’s central policies: namely death panels and the nation-wide loosening of restrictions on abortions, issues that touch on people's emotional associations. And as Kuklisnki and Quirk demonstrate, systematic bias among of the bill’s outspoken proponents were clearly prevalent. Issue framing and persuasion, which they also raise, was apparent in commercials that both supported and opposed the bill, which emphasized particular aspects that were likely blown out of proportion.

While citizens didn’t have the capacity to directly support or oppose the Bill, the power of their votes was evident as congressmembers seem highly attuned to the opinions of their constituents during these debates. (I at least received several emails from my representatives asking for my take on the issue.) But what I think this example also raises is the benefits of an informed – or uniformed – citizenry. The appeal to the masses seemed to both slow and distort the reform process and politicians spent time clarifying and re-clarifying specifics of the bill or their positions on it in order to defend their seats. Infrequently did the debates in mass media seem intelligent and diplomatic. Might the reform process have been more efficient if citizen input was less considered and instead, left to experts?