A reader submitted the following paragraph for free proofreading:
The health care reform has been the source of avid discussions and controversies among all the stakeholders of the Health Care Industry. President Obama finally got a vote from the legislative branch. This action stems from President George W. Bush who introduced in 2004 an initiative to promote the development of a nationwide system of health information technology. He appointed Mike Leavitt, Health and Human Services Secretary to spearhead the mission impossible of providing all American citizens the access to an electronic medical record by 2014. This means the industry must adopt a technology infrastructure for the health care system at large by bringing together various stakeholders with different needs and agendas.
It is important to keep reminding the stakeholders about the goal of CMR. It is short change to attribute the success to only transferring data from paper to electronic format. It is instead to transform the sector of healthcare into a system of healthcare where all stakeholders, primarily consumers, can obtain information about the quality and the cost related to their health care.
The opening sentence is fine, except we don’t need to capitalize “Health Care Industry.” People often capitalize important words in error. We only capitalize proper nouns: names or titles. This is a stylist issue, so you might see differences from one publication to another, but in general, we avoid capitals. As I was once taught: CapiTals jAr the EYe. Ask yourself: “Is this a name?” If the answer is “yes,” then, by all means, use capitals. So we would capitalize “Health Care Reform Council” since it’s the name of an organization, but health care industry is simply a general concept in which to group some businesses.
Next we have some jumps in logic. The paragraph mentions the recent vote in Congress on the reform package promoted by President Obama. Then it jumps way back to President Bush. The whole thing could read better if there was some discussion about the recent vote, then introducing the Bush measures as background. Additionally, I think the logic is weak to equate the changes Obama promoted, which extended health care to millions of Americans who were without health insurance with changes to record-keeping promoted by Bush. I’d really want more information to be able to link the two.
In the beginning of the second paragraph the writer refers to CMR. I’m not in the health care industry, so I don’t know what this means. It’s standard, when using an acronym like that to follow the first mention with the full name in parentheses. “…the goal of CMR (Cosmic Mindful Rejuvenation).” The phrase “It is short change…” seems wrong. Clearly the logic is that it is not enough. But “short change” means someone is being cheated and we have to do some pretty fancy writing to retain the phrase while fixing the logic. So let’s just change it to say: “It is not enough to attribute the success…” Then we change the following sentence to “The process is a transformation of the sector of healthcare into a system where…” I eliminated the repetition of the word “healthcare” here as it was not necessary.
Overall, it’s not a bad introduction to an essay. It started with a general statement, then moved into an item of current interest and then toward the meat of the discussion, the changes of medical information. All that it needs is a little more work to link the logic. If we revise it, with a few additional grammar changes it becomes:
The health care reform has been the source of avid discussions and controversies among all the stakeholders of the Health Care Industry. President Obama recently got a vote from the legislative branch on a reform package to extend coverage to millions of Americans. Previous presidents have also sought reform on aspects of healthcare policy. President George W. Bush introduced, in 2004, an initiative to promote the development of a nationwide system of health information technology. Bush appointed Mike Leavitt, Health and Human Services Secretary, to spearhead the mission impossible of providing all American citizens the access to an electronic medical record by 2014. This means the industry must adopt a technology infrastructure for the health care system at large by bringing together various stakeholders with different needs and agendas.
It is important to keep reminding the stakeholders about the goal of CMR (C– M– R–). It is not enough to attribute the success of CMR to only transferring data from paper to electronic format. The process is a transfomation of the sector of healthcare into a system of healthcare where all stakeholders, primarily consumers, can obtain information about the quality and the cost related to their health care.