Across the United States, people say that health care costs are too high, too many are uninsured, and too many don’t get the care they need. But it is not easy to reach agreement on just what we should do.

To find a solution, we all will need to play a part. By talking together we can begin to find a way to cope with the rising cost of health care.

As citizens, we have to make decisions together before we can act together, whether with other citizens or through legislative bodies. Acting together is essential for addressing problems that can’t be solved by one group of people or one institution. [National Issues Forums]

The National Issues Forum Institute would like to remind you to please go online and participate in our online healthcare deliberation!  We are trying to expand the impact of deliberation, by reaching more people in new ways, and we’d like you to help! You can do so in several ways:

1.  Go to http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102835914317&s=2401&e=001XXenWmCX01ixNWN8kfwy0c5aPRyJkthMdOcQn5TAn5nWw_eCG8a_7-QKZHXujta4E5qxBJE6VkpVORvmROXtXrH9Nl8d1tTUQNbUMJvo6dv0RxUUpr-_3trKYz1BXRYulCDdbL9Exw4=  to participate in our online deliberation! You can complete a workbook which helps you work through the advantages, disadvantages, and tradeoffs of three different approaches to health care reform, plus you can also share your personal experiences and read the experiences of others!

2.  Forward this link on to your friends and contacts! We want to reach more than just “the usual suspects” with this workbook, so please, forward this link on to anyone else you think might be interested in either this issue or deliberation in general.

3..  Post this link on your Facebook or Twitter page, and post it to the wall of any organization or person you think might be interested!

Once again, we really need your participation to make this experiment with online deliberation a success! If you are interested in the results of this experiment, let us know and we’d be happy to share them with you when the project is complete!

My thanks to Carolene Endersby for calling this site to my attention.

Misleading ads are commonplace on the internet. It isn’t easy to know what is factual truth and what isn’t. The video above was put out by

The Independent Women’s Forum. IWF is a nonprofit organization that’s conservative and Republican-leaning. Its Web site says that it supports “greater respect for limited government” and “free markets.” In 2003, when IWF’s director was Nancy Pfotenhauer, an aide to Senator John McCain during his 2008 presidential run, the group announced an affiliation with the conservative Americans for Prosperity, the group that’s now behind a misleading ad on health care.

This 60-second ad will air on a $750,000 buy from Sept. 4 through Sept. 9 on national cable stations, according to IWF. It also ran in late August on about a $1 million buy, as estimated by the Campaign Media Analysis Group of TNS Media Intelligence, in several states including Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska and Nevada. [FactCheck]

The video ad says “300,000 American women with breast cancer might have died” if our health care were “government run” like England’s, citing the American Cancer Society as a source for the figure.

[Read more →]