On the campaign trail then candidate Obama voiced a pledge of health care reform and 2009 could be the year America Health care system get reformed. The White House is now certainly exerting all its influence on achieving comprehensive reform, with the Administration holding online Q&A’s to the public and releasing nearly all footage of healthcare statements and events. One such event was President Obama’s Townhall meeting on health care reform, it saw the President taking real time questions form the audience and from user submitted video questions to Youtube, and questions via Facebook.

The President through press conferences and interviews has constantly reiterated the message that healthcare reform must be done, the most common of which “reform is not a luxury its a necessity”. One of the President main objectives in comprehensive healthcare reform is to make health care affordable to the 46 million uninsured Americans, that’s 1in 6 uninsured Americans.

The White house is certainly focusing all of it influence and power on attaining reform by the end of the year and this is evident in the Administration use of all possible media outlets to broadcast the message that healthcare reform is essential., not just traditional outlets like T.V., Papers and radio but new media as well, making comprehensive use of online video through service such as Vimeo and You Tube. Also by using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter ensuring the people receive its message in its entirety with no media spin and also to get the distribute the message that health care reform is essential to as many demographics as possible.

Even with the full momentum of the White House behind healthcare reform, could reform be derailed by special interest groups and lobbyist? The answers is yes it is a plausible scenario, well it has happened before… Lets go back to the presidential race of 1992, Bill Clinton ran for President with the pledge of providing health care insurance for all American, back then 37 million Americans were lacking health care insurance. Clintons pledge was popular and was one of many reasons which culminated into him winning the Presidency of the United States. In a nationally televised speech before the United States Congress President Clinton vowed that he would guarantee every American a comprehensive package of benefits that would equal the benefits provided by most of the fortune 500 companies. This promise came into action less than a year after Clinton had assumed Office, and his health care proposal was met with positive polling with the majority of American in favour of it. However a little than a year later support for the health care proposal had drastically fallen with many polls showing the majority of Americans in opposition to Clintons Proposal. So where did it all go wrong?

Clintons health care bill/proposal became the target for lobbyist working on behalf of special interest groups mainly private insurers. The cost of the lobbying was the most expensive in U.S history racking up a cost of over $100 million. This along with the media speculation changed public perception of the health care proposal causing them to distrust the proposal which ultimately lead to greater opposition and the termination of the health care bill, 1994. Now after that brief bit of history could the same thing happen again? unlikely but not impossible.