#AskObama: Healthcare, Technology and the Deficit

With more than 200 million tweets per day, it’s no wonder why Obama took to the social media airwaves to answer some of the most pressing questions from everyday American citizens. During his live “town hall” aka #AskObama today, the President answered tweets from all over the country .

In a time when our country is in the midst of a job crisis and health reform battle, Obama has made social history becoming the first president to live tweet. He’s definitely not a new topic of discussion on Twitter, in fact according to his social media specialists, President Obama comes up in more than half of the everyday twitter discussions.

Screenshot of Obama's first tweet courtesy of the live town hall

Eight curators from across the country chose from the 169,395 random tweets sent to the hashtag “#AskObama”.  23 percent of the tweets focused on jobs, 18 percent on the budget, 18 percent on taxes and 11 percent focused on education — all of which tie into the healthcare sector and it’s success.

The second question of the hour-long live “town hall” was an interesting take on job growth and technology:

Obama’s Response: “We have to be successful at the cutting edge industries of the future, manufacturing jobs end up having higher wages typically and have greater multiplier effects — one manufacturing job can support several other jobs. We want to focus on advanced manufacturing that focuses on combing technology but makes sure the production is here,” said President Obama during the live tweet-up.

President Obama then went into his top three for how we can combine manufacturing and technology to increase job growth and the overall state of the economy:

1. Invest in research and development to emphasize technology
2. Drastically improve how we train our workforce and kids on math and science and technology. “We need a top notch infrastructure to support this new wave of technology”.
3. We need to invest in clean energy

“You can combine high tech with manufacturing and then you get the best of all worlds,” said President Obama.

Combing the manufacturing industry with high tech is an interesting concept and could turn out to be quite successful. Even with producing some of the equipment our doctors and nurses use every day right her in US territory would be a great achievement for the healthcare sector. Practice Fusion was a tad disappointed Obama didn’t touch on Electronic Health Records or respond to our tweets, but we get he’s a pretty busy man.

So what do you think- was this virtual town hall a good idea? If you could ask Obama any question, what would it be?