This is a big fat topic, Reconciliation and Health Care Reform,  and it occurred to me, one that would be perfect for a Crimson Hexagon Opinion Monitor – just like the one they did on the Winter Olympics yesterday – see How We Hate NBC’s Olympics Coverage: A Statistical Breakdown.   I don’t have access to the Opinion Monitor to use in this fashion.

It’s too big a subject for me to really cover well there – but I’ll try to touch on it.

However, I’ll use social monitoring tools I do have at my disposal that I can use for my own personal use (so I can write about it) – and try to answer the question of how people feel about reconciliation of the Health Care Reform bill currently in Congress.  These days I’m getting access to almost any platform I want to write about …. so maybe this will come to pass too, with CH.  By the way, based on Crimson Hexagon’s analysis of the Winter Olympics – there’s not much love in the house for NBC and 73% expressed negative sentiment – I’ll leave it at that.

So how do people who are talking about  Health Care Reconciliation feel about it – is it what Senator Coburn warns against majority-vote tactic in weekly Republican address? – the story that got me thinking about writing this post.

Based on what Sysomos Map is saying – the overall sentiment is for Reconciliation – if we can interpret the data that way and I have found Sysomos pretty good in that department is favorable towards Reconciliation of the Health Care bill -and that’s different than the hype we hear from the “football game” going on in Washington DC right now – here’s the monitoring that took place over the last 6 months – with the query being “reconciliation AND “Health Care” AND (healthcare OR “healthcare summit” OR tactic OR Obamacare)”

With a Crimson Hexagon Opinion Monitor I could have gone into the specific attitudes people are taking about Heath Care reform and Reconciliation – maybe that’s the only platform that can go that far – but still I can accomplish a lot with the tools I have.

I, personally, would like to see the Health Care bill Reconciled – that might color my perception.

Finding that before we can really gauge online sentiment on this subject -   must get even more precision than, perhaps I can get with the tools I’m using here.   I found too many places where I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at – so I won’t stand behind this analysis – this just an exploration to see what I could come up with – I don’t claim it’s accurate or not – just what I noticed while looking into this matter.

But if I’m looking for evidence online that might be construed to say that people are favorable  to the idea of Reconciliation of the Health Care bill, I may have found it – and if other people want to pull out polls that say people are not for Reconciliation – that can do that – it’s still a free country and everyone can have their own opinion. Invariably, what we seek, we will find – and if our reality is Quantum, and white is black for some people, while for others it is gray, welcome to our world – the world we live in today.

According to Sysomos Map – all this chatter has been, really, only taking place in a few places – most of the rest of the country is curiously silent or under-represented.

And Guess what – according to Sysomos Map – most of the conversations are from men.

To me that says this conversation online isn’t actually being equally vetted by all the constituents  – Sysomos picks up most of the chatter is from middle aged and senior males – now, if we could only figure out their political affiliation, we’d have something!

The more I look at this – the more I am convinced the conversation online is being manipulated to some extent – I would like to think it’s coming from opponents to the bill but I can’t really say that yet.

True, Sysomos is only able to gather industry affiliation  with about 5% of the blog posts it monitored over the last 6 months – but 19% of what it picked up is from “Communications” and that raises a red flag – what if the message of what is actually happening in Washington is being drowned out by people who are spreading the messages they want or are paid, to spread.   Why are so many of the profiles from “communications” …. hmmm.


But then again, isn’t the sentiment overall positive?  Positive about what?  What is the real topic being measured?  This is really a pull between Red and Blue – most of the chatter is really coming from a couple of places – the rest is defused and not that focused.

What we can see right now is the main “handles” to this conversation on reconciliation are the legislation is perceived to be “Democratic Senate legislation”  that can be filibustered by Republicans – that’s the main theme here in the buzzgraph, below.

And there’s some key conversations that are being picked out from blogs

and opposed, Americans are – a poll taken by oft liberally skewed gallup says that 49% of Americans oppose the democratic healthcare bill while only 42% support it.

in the wake of the white house’s health care summit, reconciliation is still seen as the likely route that congressional leaders and their liberal allies will take to jam obamacare through congress.

on Christmas eve the senate passed obamacare with no public option, a provision that allows federal monies to go to abortion and a tax on high-cost health plans.

the plan is for the house to pass the senate version of obamacare, then for the house and senate to use the health care nuclear option to pass a new bill that amends the old bill.

the american people should take note that washington continues to view their opposition with contempt and politicians would like you to believe that they know what is best for america.

reich argues that “republicans have done a far better job scaring americans about health care reform than any pollster has been able to uncover.”

furthermore, obama appeared to set a new deadline by the end of march for passing a deal with the gop before passing obamacare via reconciliation..

translated into english this means that they are worried that if the american people are allowing time to read the president’s new proposal and review it, then there could be a problem with passage.

the bipartisan blair house summit was merely some feel good politics before the real effort by democrats to jam an unpopular obamacare bill through congress using a the procedural nuclear option.

it would be interesting for the left to produce other bills that have failed during the use of the regular order for a bill, necessitating congress to resort to reconciliation.

interesting that by a margin of 59 to 34 percent, americans want congress to start over on health care reform if there was no bipartisan consensus reached at the health care summit.

they want to rid the senate of the filibuster and the reconciliation procedure, the health care nuclear option, is a means to get what they could not get when they followed the rules.

that bill contained a public option, strong anti-abortion language and an income surtax on wealthy individuals, but it has been tossed aside in this new strategy.

after a month from now, he will probably try to use a maneuver called budget reconciliation to pass the proposal with a simple majority in the house of representatives and the senate.

politico and others are reporting that obama intends to discard any pretense of bipartisanship early next week and work on pushing obamacare through both houses of congress.