I think looking at the report from McKinsey & Company, the world’s leading consulting institution will be most beneficial to my own research project. The report is from the “insights and publications” section on McKinsey’s official website. According to the footnote after the article, these insights and publications are aim to “help advance the practice of management and provide leaders with facts on which to base business and policy decisions.” (McKinsey & Company) So the article is mainly focused on the potential readers as managers and professionals in the healthcare industry who have specific knowledge of the industry, and are willing to get these profound insights to improve their management and future plans. As a professional business reports, the article focused on the overall situation of the market and the government’s policy. It opened with introducing the background information of big data in the healthcare industry, and gives out two reasons of why employing big data in healthcare industry is important and super beneficial. Then it analyzes the technology with some generalized argument, followed with solid evidence and numeric data. The evidences included in the article are all real life examples in the industry. The numbers from the financial data, along with the help the charts, give the readers clear sense of what is being discussed. And these numbers are really crucial in the business world. Then, based on the overall background of the market and solid evidence, the article discussed the future development and the potential improvement could be made by their partners. At the end, it also points out the possible flaws and risks of the technology, which can be viewed as the rigorous and considerate features of the business report in consulting.

 

The King’s Speech, a film received twelve Oscar nominations in 2010, depicts the story of King George VI as a King who has stammer. After his brother abdicated the thrown, King George VI reluctantly assumed the thrown. As the King of the United Kingdom, he had to give his public some inspiring and energetic speech especially during the period of World War II. However, as a stammer, it was really a huge obstacle to overcome for him to give a speech before the public. After seeing a lot of therapists but nothing helps, George came to see Lionel Logue, a private therapist. Unlike the common therapy methods, Lionel tried to comfort George and helped him to find the courage. Though the therapy, the King even became friends with the ordinary “private therapist.” And eventually, he succeeded in making great speeches and led the nation through the WWII. As a stammer who has linguistic disability, the King just represents the stereotype of having to overcome a lot of obstacles. And more than the physical disability of stammer, he had more to overcome psychologically. He had to be courageous and brave.

                                                                               Annotated Bibliography

Calmes, Jackie. "Obama to Campaign to Ensure Health Law’s Success." New York Times. 4 Nov.2013. Web. 5 Nov.2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/us/politics/obama-to-campaign-to-ensure-health-laws-success.html?ref=healthcarereform&_r=0>.

The article is mainly about on the fifth anniversary of his election, President Obama reassured his supporters about his ambition and his plan of the health-care plan. The President also talks about the unexpected technical issue of the official government website healthcare.gov and said the problem will be fixed shortly. Furthermore, the President answered his criticizers why some companies had cancelled individual policies after the President promised that “American could keep their current coverage under his insurance program.” The reason is mainly because these plans did not meet the minimum coverage standards set by the Affordable Care Act. For my independent research, this information will be valuable when I research on how the consultants and the companies design the healthcare plans.

 

As my primary professional interest, I will try to research disability along with the consultants and the health care project. I will start from looking at the news reports and latest arguments over the health care project, like the shutdown of the US government, which to some extent has some issue related to the large economic burden created by the Obama Health Project. And also, I will examine the specific health care plans for people with disabilities. I may choose two specific times to compare, like the plan in 1990 when ADA was just carried out and the plan today. From these comparisons, it may give me some basic idea of the overall condition of people with disabilities and their living standards. And also, I may implicitly get the idea of whether society and people have paid more attention on people with disabilities. And from the consultants’ side, I could also examine their role in the designing process of the health care plans. Like, what do they most care about, the benefit of their employers, the government act, or maybe the benefit of people with disabilities. And what’s more, in these health care plans, there are always some prefix at the very beginning that is saying what kinds of people could meet the requirement and take the benefit of the health care plan. And these words are always the most official words for defining disability. By looking over the changes of these words over decades, I may get an idea of the government’s and social attitude towards people with disabilities.