How You Can Help Congress Write the Health Care Bill

July 17, 2009 – Whether you have and are wondering how much it will go up this year, are living without insurance, or are satisfied with your insurance, you have a vested interest in the specifics of any health care bill that Congress passes.

Huffington Post is sponsoring a crowdsourcing project and wants you to get involved. The Health Care Bill is long and tedious, but many eyes make for accurate and quick reading of the whole document. The software application that HuffPo is using will be part of your browser window as you read the bill.

You can highlight sentences or phrases, and comment on them. You will also see what others are saying about the bill. For any comment, you can vote on its accuracy, importance and whether you agree. For this project, the aim is to find important ideas and comment. You will do this by either voting on notes in the text, or adding your own notes. If this is confusing, see the HuffPo story for a link to a video that shows how it works.

This project by HuffPost and its partner, Ameritocracy, is trying out Insight, a beta release of its collaboration and research tool. The tool works inside your browser and spreads the work of evaluating the ideas in the bill among lots of workers reaching potentially everyone with a computer and Internet.

In the past, HuffPo has posted legislation and then collected e-mails about problematic line items and reader comments. With Insight, controversial line items will be out there for readers to consider, vote on, and discuss.

For more information read Health Care Bill Released: What Does Congress Hope You’re Missing (INTERACTIVE INVESTIGATION).