The Best Slide Deck in the World: Explaining Health Care Reform
Social slide deck site SlideShare will announce today the winners of its 3rd annual "Best Presentation in the World" contest. A panel of business presentation expert judges selected one deck as the grand prize winner out of 3,750 entries from over 130 countries.
That grand prize winner was titled Healthcare Napkins All and was created by visual communication specialist Dan Roam and Dr. Tony Jones. You may or may not agree with the political perspective of this 51-slide presentation, but it's an undeniably impressive way to deliver information.
The winning presentation has been viewed more than 100,000 times and has been embedded on over 300 other websites. Additional winners were announced in 5 categories, ranging from technology to business to creative/offbeat. Winners were picked by a judging panel made up of Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, and David Armano, founding member of Dachis group.
SlideShare is a site that has seen surprising growth in just a few short years. Presentation decks may be terribly unsexy but the utility of a good one is clear. Traffic analysts Compete.com report that the SlideShare website saw 1.2 million unique visitors in August. The site fell victim to a malware distribution scam last month but remains one of the least hyped yet most appreciated social media services launched in the last five years.
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I appreciate the effort to simplify the issue, but in doing so, I'm afraid the slideshow overdoes it. Let's consider what happens AFTER we choose an option. Latching on to a great idea and then sinking billions of dollars into it is a little like building some really high-tech strap-on wings and then jumping off the Empire State Building. Surely they'll work! They're a great idea! It doesn't take into account dozens of other factors such as how the market will react by which I mean how PEOPLE will react. This reminds me of watching football with my wife. Anytime there's a run between the tackles, she says, "The guy just ran right into the pile! Why didn't he go around it?" She doesn't think far enough ahead to realize that if he had run to the right, the "pile" would have moved to the right as well. Proponents of government intrusion in the free market fail to think beyond their "great idea" and consider how it will play out in a dynamic market.
This presentation is dishonest.
Big Lie #1 - You say its not healthcare reform but insurance reform, however, the proposed legislation will completely regulate and effectively ration healthcare service providers, both directly and through its restructuring of healthcare insurance. So it is healthcare reform.
Big Lie #2 (biggest of all) - Today we have a PURELY business-driven insurance model. That statement is absolutely false. How many states regulate insurance? No, its not 57. How deeply embedded is the federal govt already in healthcare (what is Medicare/Medicaid)? Who makes it illegal for insurance companies to compete across state lines? The truth is that government laws and regulations underlie many of the problems in the healthcare insurance market. One only need to look to Canada, UK or France to see how it can get worse with MORE government intrusion.
Big Lie #3 (lie by omission) - this analysis constrains itself to insurance expressly to avoid having to address the consequences of "insurance reform" upon healthcare service delivery. As Dick Morris repeatedly has pointed out, you can't add 50 million new patients to the system with the same number of doctors and healthcare facilities and NOT have rationing of services. Under options 2 & 3 in the analysis, that rationing will be effectively performed by bureaucrats who write and enforce the regulations that will govern healthcare service (all in the guise of cost control/payment plans).
So, yes, it is a nice pretty presentation, but it is still one BIG FAT LIE!
I too am surprised with the Winners of the contest. When there were many honest entries better.
Things slideshare should keep in mind are not only pictures, but the awareness, creativity, real talent.
I am totally disappointed, many people will be I think.
So if I follow this right: Cost go up for everyone (Gov plan) and service goes down... VS: cost go up for some (existing), services goes down... AND there are no other options or ideas. Hmmm. I better not shout. I should start thinking like the stick figures said, because if I shout I must not be thinking. Maybe people are shouting because after being talked down to by stick figures (literal and figurative) there's not much else to do. Observation America 2009.
Best slideshow in the World? The world is bigger then the USA, and the healthcare topic is of no relevance to anybody outside that region. Other then a high entertainment value for Europeans (*%$^&% Socialists!)
I guess is all has to do with what your definition of 'best' is, and perhaps a slight bias based on who the judges were. :)
I love your style Dan!
A presentation is, by its nature, biased. So people commenting on the politics of it are missing the point in a contest like this. My guess is the judges were asked to judge the effectiveness of the presentation at achieving its goals (as well as creativity, technique, etc.) And to me, simplicity is always better. This presentation does a great job at communicating a complex idea in a simple way. Therefore, regardless of politics or the topic itself, it achieved its goals.
This argument, though elegant, mis-states the parties involved. "Me" is not one of the parties. I don't purchase insurance. My employer does. I have little to say about it. This is a result of--you guessed it--government. Government doesn't really allow me to purchase insurance. It provides tax incentives to employers, not individuals. If it truly were "Me" dealing with insurance companies and providers, we'd have a potentially much more competitive marketplace--just like we have for car insurance. Instead of a thousands of employers (with very different consumer motives than me) purchasing insurance (and leaving me to deal the with the consequences), we could have *millions* of individual consumers purchasing insurance, policing the market. Government has already rigged the system in favor of insurance companies and unions (who fought for the current tax-advantaged, employer-based system). So, arguably, the current situation is not market-driven enough. We already have too much government involvement, which is causing the out-of-control inflation of insurance and provider costs. Unleash millions of true consumers on the marketplace, and we would likely see a very different climate, as we have seen with auto insurance when government gets out of the way.