"If we could get people engaged with it and playing around with it, and making things transparent and having them see — really see their digital footprint — then we could have a different kind of discussion about it".
The specialists — the cardiologists, neurologists, surgeons and others — may have a different take on the discussion, Mr. Laszewski noted, especially if Congress cannot raise salaries of primary-care doctors without taking money from the highly paid specialists.
For instance, he said, "if we had today's media in 2002, we would have had a very different discussion about the Iraq War".
However, females generally reported not having discussed family planning with their spouse, whereas males reported high levels of spousal discussion on family planning, suggesting the focus of such discussions may have a different perspective for males and females.
"Perhaps this can be a moment where we can renew some kind of effort to get the parties into a discussion to have a different track than we have been on over the last couple of years," he said, adding that it was unclear what government would emerge from Israel's recent election.
By contrast, there is less opportunity for patients to affect the outcome of a physiotherapist's assessment who possess greater specialist expertise in musculoskeletal conditions than GPs, and where work related discussions may have a different objective and meaning for patients (and physiotherapists).
"If Le Pen gets elected, we're going to have a very different discussion going on about Europe," said Guntram B. Wolff, the director of Bruegel, a political and economic policy think tank based in Brussels.
Of course, we'd probably be having a whole different discussion if Microsoft had released this in 2007 instead of continuing to give mouth-to-mouth to the decaying Windows Mobile brand.
