Mobilizing Supporters of Obama's Healthcare Reform Requires New Strategy

To have any hope of getting his healthcare reform package through Congress, President Obama will need the same level of grass-roots support he had during the presidential campaign. Without a new strategy for creating it, however,that's going to prove difficult.

The huge mobilized base of support Obama enjoyed during the presidential campaign was comprised of mostly young and healthy people. When it comes to healthcare, there's no group whose lives are touched less on a day-to-day basis than the healthy, robust masses in their 20's and 30's. For them personally, healthcare reform is, at best, an ideological issue. Unlike the economy or even the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, there's no perceivable impact from the issue, unless they get sick and, even then, only gravely so.

To gain the support of the young and healthy for reform of a system that seems to immediately affect only the old(er) and sickly, is going to require the same kind of effort that the Civil Rights movement of the 60's required. That movement garnered support from millions who were not personally touched by racism through actively exposing the injustices and inequality of the status quo. Young people today will respond and, hopefully, mobilize on the healthcare issue, but they'll have to witness the injustices and inequality that infect healthcare in the U.S. Specifically, they'll have to be shown how their parents, relatives, friends, and other members of society are suffering daily under the current system.