14 days and counting

At this point in the year, it is impossible to pick up a paper, watch television, listen to the radio or read the day’s news online without seeing ample coverage about the upcoming presidential election. The election is like a wave that builds and crashes once every four years; the supply of “uncommitteds” and “undecideds” diminishes rapidly as the tide of buzz and activity swoops up those who are usually not obsessed or even otherwise interested in politics.

Where do you turn for your information about the election, to help make up your mind or to follow along and cheer for your preferred candidate? I’ll usually read my local paper and listen to NPR on the way into work. I have been long partial to www.cnn.com and www.msnbc.com for the basic headlines, though these days I guess that defines my political leanings, now that the “mainstream media” has been forever removed from the ranks of the impartial (not to mention my NPR habit). For political commentary I turn to www.realclearpolitics.com, which helpfully collates editorials and opinion pieces from most leading newspapers and popular journals. And this year, I’ve added www.fivethirtyeight.com to the mix, a site with admittedly biased leanings that nonetheless tries to use objective statistical models (of the kind used in Baseball Prospectus) to crunch each day’s mound of state and national polling data in order to predict future trends.

I realize that most people probably don’t get quite as wrapped up in politics as I do, which means that most aren’t getting quite my version of non-stop 24/7 election-year politics. However, one area consistently important to voters (a top issue for 26% of independents, according to recent Kaiser Family Foundation polls) is conspicuously absent from most of the national election discussions that I follow. This, of course, is health care. Projected to be responsible for 25% of GDP in coming years, health care has typically been mentioned only in passing reference to debate coverage. And, when the topic has come up, one specific (though clearly enormously important) area has dominated the discussion, which is the difference between the candidates in the proposed best way to fund health insurance. In its most simplified, this comes down to whether to weaken or strengthen the existing system of employer-based coverage.

This leads me to my questions of the week: have you made up your mind about who you will vote for this year? If the answer is yes, how much — if at all — has that candidate’s position on health care influenced your decision? In other words, would you have decided to vote for your candidate anyway, even if you happened to agree with his health care proposals — or was the health care plan a major deciding factor in your decision? And what effects do you feel your candidate’s plans will have on the private or academic practice of hematology and oncology — or do you find it difficult to tell what these effects will be?

I look forward to your thoughts and comments.