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Is Social Media the Answer to the Health Insurance Debate?

The debate over health insurance and healthcare reform ignites strong feelings among most groups in America today. Politicians have struggled to discern even the vaguest idea of a compromised, mutually beneficial solution. Many citizens feel left out, confused, or angry about the entire debate. However, all people should be able to contribute their experiences and background to the discussion. With a background in social media, I can’t help but think of ways social media & social networking could apply to the conversation. This quick article is not meant to propose social media as a comprehensive solution, but rather as a brief summary of how a social media enabled technological capacity

could contribute positively to and perhaps radically change the structure of a future health insurance system.

UberTwitter Taught Me How to Tweet

I always tend to bastardize technology: leverage technology to make things and not necessarily to use them how they were *meant* to be used. For instance, when I learned about Twitter I thought, cool, now I have a way to structure standardized text and propagate it efficiently around the web. I still can't stop thinking about applications for Twitter and real time communication - it can be applied to almost any life context you can think of. It's going to change the world, really.

So when I discovered Twitter I didn't think, wow, now I can tell people what I'm eating for lunch.

But then I downloaded UberTwitter and I suddently got the social in social media. Simply because of how the user interface on UberTwitter emphasizes the stream of user updates, I started seeing Twitter in the kind of context you're supposed to view it in. I started paying attention to the pull and not the push. In other words, I started caring about what the people I follow have to say. I started unfollowing anyone I don't want to listen to and caring about the smaller group of people I do follow. It's really opened up a new perspective for me. I check in every twenty minutes for the pithy, empathetic, and sometimes promotional tweets by a group of not-so-strangers. I said I got Twitter six months ago, but I think I really get it now.

I never want to stop thinking of social media for what it could be instead of what it is. But it's refreshing for me to see why everybody loves Twitter and gets addicted. It's real life and it's real connection with real people. It's really not about web distribution systems and structured text. (who woulda thunk?) I'm getting there, but it's taking a while! For lunch today, btw, I had a nice mushroom and cheese chicken panini.