As if young people don’t get enough life advice — aka nagging — from their parents, Vice President Joe Biden told moms on Tuesday to call up their kids and convince them to sign up for Obamacare.
The Vice President sat down with the ladies of ABC’s The View on Tuesday morning, and unlike Late Night host Seth Meyers the night before, Barbara Walters immediately stuck Biden with a hard topic: Obamacare. The journalist point-blank asked if the law was a job killer, as the Congressional Budget Office report seemed to suggest. Biden refuted the claim and presented the staid White House talking point that it would allow for job flexibility.
Co-host Sherri Shepherd then lobbed a softball question — if you can call it that — at the Vice President.
“I know you have a key message that you want to get out to a key group of people for Obamacare, which is moms and young adults,” Shepherd said. “So is there something you want to say to them?”
“Thanks for the prompt,” Biden joked, before getting serious. “The truth is that no matter how old we get, we still listen to our moms. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true.”
The Vice President detailed his own personal experience with a medical crisis during his youth, saying that he would not have been able to afford his health care bills without insurance.
“So moms have great influence,” the VP said. “Call your sons and daughter. Tell them, ‘Sign up.’ It’s for them, and it’s for your mom’s peace of mind.”
“Well why do you think young people are not flocking?” co-host Whoopi Goldberg asked. “Because I would — all I wanted was healthcare when I was a young mother.”
Biden responded that young people think they’re invincible and believe the health insurance plans available to them are more expensive than they actually are. The Vice President, who recently admitted that enrollment in the President’s healthcare law will be lower than needed come March 31, pointed out that 25 percent of those who have signed up for Obamacare are young people.
The Vice President’s appeal to the mothers of America is very familiar. The White House and Health and Human Services have been playing up the relationship between parents and their children in an effort to get Millennials to take the Obamacare bait. HHS released an advertisement featuring ‘mom jeans’ earlier this month.
Watch the full interview below:
