Monroe Anderson

ObamaCare The Game could battle the evil Echo Chamber

While attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week in New Orleans, I came up with an idea as to how the Obama Administration could help us understand the historic health care law. I wrote a column about it for The Root website.

'Obamacare,' the Video Game?

This writer says that the repacking of the president's accomplishments would keep his message in play.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: June 29, 2012 at 12:48 AM

 

(The Root) -- The Saturday before the 2010 November midterm elections, President Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod was a call-in guest on a radio show I was co-hosting. Team Obama was already bracing for a shellacking, since for months one Republican after the next had lip-synched right-wing talking points, accusing the POTUS of having accomplished zip.

I knew the Republicans were playing fast and loose with the truth. I knew that, like it or not, in his first two years in office, Barack Obama had scratched more off his to-do list than any other U.S. president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.

So I asked Axelrod why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term. I dare not try to reconstruct the entire answer from the president's then senior adviser, but I will repeat two words that jumped out at me: "Information gridlock."

That's right. Axelrod's defense for a failure to communicate was that Obama's accomplishments came at such a breakneck pace that the White House press office didn't have the time to make sure that everyone following could keep up with the score. Maybe. Maybe not. But it would seem that the one achievement that is the most momentous since LBJ pushed Medicare and Medicaid through Congress in 1965 might have gotten a little special treatment: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

It hasn't helped that from its conception through passage until now, the right-wing echo chamber has been in superdrive, dogging and demonizing the president's health care law. But I've got an app for that: Obamacare the Game.

Rather than trying to run down all the complicated bennies and perks hidden in the 2,600-page law, a computer game would have players racing through level after level, virtually discovering the rewards or penalties for either being or not being enrolled in the health plan.

It wouldn't matter whether it was a strategy, simulation or role-playing game, as long as it was available for a free download on the Obama-campaign website for every system from iPad to Xbox to desktop -- Facebook, too. The gamification of the president's historic accomplishment could quickly and easily be a mind changer, slaying the stream of poison that the right keeps spewing. With the flick of a click, Americans would be able to go from unenlightened and turned off to informed and engaged.

How to beat the right-wing smear-and-fear machine came to me while I was in "The Gamification of News" session at the National Association of Black Journalists' convention last week. Although the panel was focused on a cutting-edge tactic for engaging readers and viewers in complex news stories, my mind quickly leaped from there to politics.

Since then I have interviewed two of the gamification panelists, Manuel "Mani" Saint-Victor and Scott Anderson, to see what they thought. They both agreed that it could be done and suggested how to do it.

"Have people walk through the process of being a different person with a different illness -- [the] Sim [City] approach," said Saint-Victor, who is a former psychiatry resident physician at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital and a founder of Marveloper Media. "Let them walk through and let them see it with the Obamacare version and without the Obamacare version, not telling them which is and which isn't."

Scott Anderson, who is my firstborn as well as the co-founder and lead programmer at Enemy Airship and one of Game Developer Magazine's top 50 game developers for 2009, had a similar idea. He thinks the game should be "how to survive without health insurance." In his version of Obamacare the Game, "You have all these setbacks, and you have all these crazy things people will have to do to survive," Scott said. "It might not be fun, but it'll be effective. People will say, 'Oh, wow'; if these things happened to me, I'd be screwed."

Although gamification hasn't come to politics in a big way yet, it is already being played out in advertising through reward cards and loyalty systems, Saint-Victor said. Of course, almost everybody is familiar with the SimCity games, and there's even a game called Cut Throat Capitalism, which explores the economics of Somali pirates and why they do what they do. "You basically pick what ships they go after and how you'll treat the hostages," Anderson said.

The Supreme Court may have upheld the individual mandate on Thursday, but hold up on the high fives. Just how badly the Obama administration and campaign need to get beyond the information gridlock is patently obvious.

A majority of Americans -- 54 percent -- still believe that Obamacare should be repealed. Republicans have spent three times more money bad-mouthing the president's health law than Democrats have spent explaining it. Right now there are 3 million small-business people who qualify for a health care tax credit.

A mere 170,000 have applied.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

GOP did a heck of a job on Dems for Brownie

 
 

We saw what was to come a year ago when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. sworn in President Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. 

What should have been a smooth and seamless ceremony wasn't. Chief Justice Roberts got the words wrong. The new President had to go through the swearing-in later--one more time--in the Inaugural day to make sure everything was all right.

That omen to the chief from the chief would be replayed and replayed and replayed with different verses, but the same tune throughout Obama's first 365 days in office. While I seriously doubt that the swearing-in trip-up by Roberts, an activist conservative Supreme Court appointee, was designed to be an obstructionist gesture, it symbolizes what the activist, conservative Republican Party and its media movers and shakers had in store for Obama.

Since the double-dose Inaugural, day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, our nation and its chief executive have been bludgeoned by one Republican road block to the next in a right-wing plot to assure that Obama's promise for change goes nowhere fast.

Right off there was the Birthers. According to them, Obama was not born in the United States therefore wasn't a legal citizen therefore was ineligible to be president. A little more than six months into office, the first African American president was still in early attempts to get the health reform legislation he promised through Congress when GOP Sen. Jim DeMint declared if Republicans and conservatives stop Obama on health care reform, it would “break him” and be Obama’s “Waterloo.”

After DeMint's declarations, the Birthers were joined by the Deathers--those that claimed that the Healthcare Reform Bill was designed to let senior citizens die--and the tea-baggers who were mad as hell as not going to take it any more because Obama was a foreign-born, socialist who was out to kill the unborn, old folks and truth, justice and the American way.

All along, the Republicans voted no while providing no variable alternative to all they were rejecting. As we come to the end of Obama's first year, the Republicans have helped to assure that 177 of the White House's nominees have not been appointed--that's 107 more than the 70 Bush nominees that were still waiting after his first year in office and one heck of a way to make sure that Obama can't do a good job.

So when Massachusetts' Brownie became the first Republican to win a U.S. Senate seat since Edward Brooke retired in 1979, on cue the conservatives to healthcare. Following suit, many of the MSM reports failed to point out months before Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley that the majority of Americans were in favor of healthcare reform until the right-wingers nay-sayed it to its deathbed. Nor did enough MSM reports explain that Massachusetts already has a healthcare reform law in place so the voters in that state were either fearful that a national reform law may cost them more or were pretty much into a "I got mine, I could care less about yours" state of mind.

As if we didn't know, the main history we've learned in the past year is that negative works; that it's easier to tear down than to build up and that nice guys get to experience firsthand that old saw about if at first you don't succeed, then try, try, try again.

 
 

This column has been cross-posted on the Newsvine and the African American Opinion.com websites.

GOP's stingy stance is not a cure-all at all for swine flu

    In the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, as far as the father of the bride was concerned, Windex was the miracle cure for anything from "psoriasis to poison ivy."

    In real life, among the dwindling membership of the Party of No, lower taxes is their Windex. 

    No matter what political, economic or social challenge confronting our nation, the GOP mantra calls for lowering taxes, cutting taxes or flatlining taxes. As individual American citizens, the Republicans tell us, we can spend our money much better than the bureaucrats in Washington. 

    So, right now, right here, we have a threatening crisis that could further cripple our sick economy and, btw, who knows kill how many of us along the way: the swine flu outbreak.

    At this moment, more than 100 have died in Mexico from the influenza virus, but so far there has been no fatalities in the United State. Should this public health emergency take a turn for the worst by developing into a pandemic that leaves tens of thousands or millions of Americans dead in its wake, the only measure that will outpace finger-pointing will be vaccination shots.

    Hopefully, we'll only need vaccination shots in limited regions throughout the states. In the meantime, allow me to be one of the first to point a finger: The Know-Nothing party thwarted one preventative measure, fearing it might lead to more taxes.

    In a post entitled, GOP Know-Nothings Fought Pandemic Preparedness on the website of The Nation, John Nichols reports:

    When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse -- with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

But former White House political czar Karl Rove and key congressional Republicans -- led by Maine Senator Susan Collins -- aggressively attacked the notion that there was a connection between pandemic preparation and economic recovery.

    We don't know where this swine flu outbreak is going or how soon it will end. But the World Health Organization has been extremely concerned and vigilant since the outbreak has already crossed international borders.     

    In a special report to the GlobalPost, Christine Gorman writes: 

    Although no fatalities have been reported in the U.S., the latest reports from Mexico suggest that more than 100 people have died and at least 1,400 may have been infected with the never-before-seen flu.

 

On Sunday, Canadian health officials confirmed six cases of human swine flu — four in Nova Scotia  and two in British Columbia — while public health officials in New Zealand, Israel, France and Spain began testing several patients with flu-like illnesses who had recently traveled to Mexico to determine whether or not they also had swine flu.

 

Part of what concerns health officials is that most of the fatalities in Mexico have involved adults under the age of 60, which does not fit the usual profile of a seasonal flu outbreak. That pattern is, however, reminiscent of the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, in which the very young and the very old tended to be spared while most of the fatalities occurred in adults in their 20s to 50s.

    We've got to hope for the best here; hope that this flu virus does not mutate into something as virulent, Infectious and deadly as the 1918 flu pandemic, which resulted in more than 100 million dead worldwide, before it is over. But we've also got to hope that the mantra of the Johnny-one-note conservatives continue to ring false for more and more Americans.         

    I, like most of the rest of us, don't like paying taxes. But, besides paying for wars of aggression that I personally oppose, taxes pay for police and firemen, roads and bridges, and they help fund safety nets for those who may not be as fortunate as we are.        

    And, from time-to-time, money that we send to Washington comes back to us in a preventive measure that may be life saving for millions and therefore worth its weight in gold.

(This post was also published on the AgoraVox and the African American Opinion.com websites.)