Is Bipartisan an option when it comes to Healthcare?

My name is Becca Cooper and I'll be writing your Thursday blog posts. I'm born in raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a freshman at Occidental College. I will try to be as objective as possible, but its no secret that I tend to have a very liberal bias. As far as the controversy over health care is concerned, I know that I'm in favor of Health Care Reform. I really need to learn some more before I can make my ultimate decision, as far as which policies and amendments I like and which ones I'm not too fond of. Hopefully these weekly blog posts will help me find my stance and educate me more on the different Health Care Plan options.

Following the heated election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the State of the Union, and now our president's announcement that he will be holding a televised bipartisan summit on health care reform on February 25th, the results of a Health Care public opinion poll have been released. This Harris Interactive survey that was conducted online indicates that half of United States' adults want healthcare reform in the next two years. The controversy lies in the question of whether Obama's proposed democratic health care plan should be passed.

Overall, and specifically for Independents, the most important aspect of health care reform is now to control the out of pocket costs of healthcare and health insurance. The split between Republican and Democratic interest seems to lie in the concept that Democrats are more concerned with everyone having healthcare, while Republicans' top concern tends to be that taxes aren't increased to pay for it. Both core arguments seem to make sense to me, so it will be interesting to see where this current debate takes us.

The same survey also asked the participants which policies on the agenda were most important to them personally. The results showed that although healthcare is prevalent, reducing unemployment and creating new jobs, along with preventing terrorist attacks, are more pressing issues at the moment. If you take public opinion and pair it with Obama's State of the Union Address in which he stated that "jobs will be our number one priority," it seems that taking care of unemployment is currently a higher priority than healthcare.

For now it will be interesting to see how President Obama's televised summit goes, and what we can get accomplished as a nation. Is bipartisan an option? We'll see.

Until next Thursday,

Becca Cooper