Family Election Guide with Dr. Elaine Anderson

Unless you’ve been living under a big, big rock, you know that America is less than a week away from choosing its next president. Making an informed decision is at the heart of being a good citizen, and so to make that process easier, Dr. Elaine Anderson and graduate students from the Department of Family Science put together a “Family Election Guide.”

The guide presents objective, non-partisan information on where Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama stand on the issues facing American families. Issues featured include early childhood education, Medicare, national health care, teen pregnancy and sex education, and homeownership. It can be found online here.

For more about the guide and the process of creating it, the Healthy Turtle talked with Dr. Anderson:

The Healthy Turtle: What was the impetus for creating this guide? What were your goals in putting it together?

Dr. Elaine Anderson: The class wanted to first learn more about the candidates’ positions on various family and health policy issues since their class focus is on family and health policy. Therefore, we only looked at issues that are addressed predominately through the legislative branch. After learning more themselves, they thought the information they had learned might be of interest and relevant to other professionals, particularly in the family and health fields.

We attempted to present the materials we found in as neutral a format as possible. Therefore, you can see we predominately used the candidates' own websites so that we would not be interpreting their positions on any given issues.

HT: What do you think of the coverage the media gives health issues during the election?

Dr. Anderson: Although the media has covered health issues, we think that if the economic woes had not more recently intervened, we would probably be seeing even more attention given to health coverage. Also, most of the discussion on health issues in particular has been on cost issues with not nearly as much focus on issues of access, quality of care, or prevention initiatives (other than what is brought up to reduce costs).

HT: What are some vital health issues that you think that McCain and Obama are not addressing?

Dr. Anderson: We were surprised when exploring a variety of issues that both candidates did not have much (if any) information on their websites about mental health parity (since that has been a recent issue and was one of those "earmarks" on the bailout legislation). There was little on immigrants related to health care, and the special needs attention has predominately been on autism (and more recently Downs Syndrome). Little attention has been given to the larger spectrum of special needs children including ADHD, learning disorders, and childhood depression.

HT: Was there any issue positions from either candidate that were particularly surprising to you?

Dr. Anderson: I don't think we found any of the candidates' positions on these issues surprising to us.

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Elaine Anderson, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Family Science, and directed her health and family policy class in the creation of the Family Election Guide. The guide is available at http://www.sph.umd.edu/fmsc/fis/documents/2008FamilyElectionGuide.pdf.