Where do YOU Fall?Health Care Reform has dominated the media as of late. You have the people for it, the people against it, and the people who are not quite sure where they stand. Either way, I do believe it is a topic worth looking into. Charts and graphs on the web can build a better understanding on where the reform will be taking us. Sometimes...
I'd fall into the last category of not being sure where I stand. So taking a look around the net and news sites for graphs regarding Health Care Reform I soon found out that they can be quite confusing. Big numbers, squiggly lines, and dry reading all add to the confusion.
I finally found a graph on the Washington Post Website about future Health Care spending. This graph shows the rise in Health Care spending from 2010-2019. Since the graph is not labeled effectivley I'm going to use my best judgment and believe that this is government spending on Health Care.
You cannot look at just the graph here and say, "Yea. OK. I know whats going on." You'll have to move to the reading, and even then the point the author is attepmting to deliver is somewhat difficult to grasp. In a well made graph the reader should be able to easily understand its meaning.
A few positives of the graph:
- Rounded numbers
- Bar graph~ makes it easy to figure out we will be spending more year after year.
And then the negatives:
- Lack of lableing on the graph.
- I see small blue lines in 2012 and 2013... does that mean there is no spending those years?
- The graph might be too short. The author talks about spending in 2020-2029 but doesn't show up on the graph.
The article you’ve written about is a prime example of graphs for the sake of graphs. I agree, certainly the graph does show that spending will increase, but “Health Care Spending” can be an extremely broad term. Also, who is spending this money, and who is the graph relevant to?
ReplyDeleteUpon reading the whole article (in an effort to gain more knowledge about the graph), I ended up even more confused. The text does little to draw out the points made in the chart. I found this simply an attempt to grab a reader’s eye and flash them some broad statistic that, essentially, may mean nothing.
I am pleased that you noticed both of those points, analyzing the vagueness of the graph as well as the complexity of the rather uneventful article. Obviously they go hand in hand (supposedly) for that piece. I think Klein’s article should have stood alone. The chart and the graph seemed to combat each other and separated the article into two ideas.
Your breakdown list of the positive and negatives is helpful. However, in all honesty, I think you are being too kind to even have a “Positives” section. Sure, the graph is easy to ready and understand, but it certainly isn’t telling us anything. The general public has become far too media savvy and does not deserve to have meaningless graphs clouding important information.
The way you've come into this graphic with a bit of skepticism is certainly the right thing to do. Readers tend to discount anything that has a very clear bias, or that obviously exists only to enforce what a writer wants to say. Right off the bat this graph comes off as simple, and the message the author wanted to display with it is very transparent: that health care spending will go up drastically over time (while assuming current spending is virtually 0).
ReplyDeleteI agree with the previous comment in that giving this graphic any positive feedback at all may have been a bit soft on it (although the color coding was pleasing and effective to read) as the positives you list I would actually consider to be negatives when it comes to solid journalism.
The bar graph style and the rounded numbers seem to do a better job of obscuring what may be the actual statistics than informing the reader.
While your positives may be a bit weak, the negatives you outlined are spot on, as I feel the lack of labels on this graph are the most misleading thing about it. This graph wants us to assume before the health care bill no spending at all was committed to health care.
Not only that, but this graph doesn't even tell us who is doing the spending. It could be the government, the public, even insurance companies. Without a label, I guess this graph could even be about how much my dog is going to spend on health care in the coming years.