A Study of Media Coverage of Health Policy 1997-2000

The debate over President Clinton’s national health care reform plan put health care policy at the forefront of the national agenda in 1993 and 1994. After the end of that debate, it remained to be seen whether or not health policy would hold the media’s and the public s interest to the same degree. To help answer that and other questions, a comprehensive study of health policy media coverage from 1997 through 2000 – focusing mainly on the topics of managed care, Medicare, the uninsured, and health care costs — was undertaken by researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation, in conjunction with Princeton Survey Research Associates.