At American University’s SPA leadership program we take on big problems and see what a few individuals can do to help if they put their minds on it. This year I am a member of the Public Health and Policy group which has focused on researching healthcare to the best of our ability. Through extensive research we discovered many of the benefits and drawbacks of the Affordable Care Act. Notably, we found that when we started our research we really didn’t know much about healthcare and most members of our community didn’t know much if anything either. This isn’t trivial information either as knowing what your provider is or what rights you have to care are extremely important for maintaining health. With this in mind we toiled day and night debating and rethinking how we could best benefit our community which needed to know so much about healthcare.

 

After a long arduous process the Public Health and Policy group came to the conclusion that although we have identified a problem, we didn’t know how bad it was or to what actions needed to be taken to fix it. Naturally, we are going to do some hands on research to remedy this problem. We are conducting a survey of students at our school to inform a policy proposal for American University. Our goal is to collect the data we need to find out what American University should be doing about informing students about healthcare and the rights they have both on campus and across the country.