Rising Cost of Health Care in America Thesis

Rising Health Costs

Perception or Deception: The public face of rising health care costs

The Obama administration worked its way through the political minefields and signed into law its healthcare reforms in 2010. Some of the changes are underway, bringing about systematic modifications and other changes said to directly impacts costs. The expected result is a system that serves more people at reduced costs. And yet, as recently September 2011, when the reforms were beginning to take hold, the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation was already projecting that consumers would begin paying at least 9% more in their premiums than in 2010 -- a tripling of the standard increase from the past. Various explanations were offered, including linking 1% to 2% of the rising cost to Obama reforms. But what of the other cost differences? Why were they going up so much more? Are these increased being added because of true system costs, or were they being included for other, possibly even deceptive reasons?

My media content analysis will seek to identify what trends, if any, can be found in a variety of online media postings that shed light on the fact that costs are often directly impacted by what businesses or providers want us to think about their requirements.This fact is directly associated with a variety of systems theories and with the underlying rationale for why content analysis models work. Accordingly, I will be looking at targeted online materials that fall into one of two categories:

Perception articles will be those that are either professional or possibly journalistic in nature and that seek to impart objective content and substance; or,

Deception articles, which are those designed to influence or guide behavior or understanding by using emotional or related subjective….....