On Fox News Sunday this week, Ezekiel Emanuel said the reason young people are not signing up for Obamacare is because the administration has not promoted it enough. Considering millions of dollars have been spent on PR for President Barack Obama’s signature law, his argument holds no water. However, the real reason young people aren’t signing up is made apparent by Obamacare’s marketing.
Emanuel, one of the creators the Affordable Care Act and former advisor to Obama, said so much energy has been put into fixing HealthCare.gov, that the law has not been promoted well enough. He believes that once a “big PR campaign” is launched, millennials will sign up.
He must be forgetting the $53.8 million federally funded marketing campaign, a small part of the at least $684 million that the administration is set to spend on Obamacare advertising. This includes almost $10 million for its notable acid-trip reminiscent “Fly With Your Own Wings” advertisement, featuring flying hipsters.
The contest run by the White House, in which people created videos encouraging young people to sign up for Obamacare, also probably slipped Emanuel’s mind. The winning video, titled “Forget About The Price Tag” as a spoof of Jessie J’s song of the same name, features a young woman singing and encouraging people to sign up for Obamacare without thinking about how much it will cost. Yet average Americans are not able to spend as they please and need to think about the cost. The White House’s decision to tout the video as one which effectively promotes its own view of the law shows that it is out of touch with average Americans.
Unless $700 million isn’t enough to promote Obamacare, Emanuel is undoubtedly wrong. The problem isn’t the lack of marketing. There’s plenty of that. But what that marketing reveals is an administration that patronizes young Americans in a desperate attempt to hide the hurt it will inflict on them.
Obamacare works by taking advantage of young people to pay for older people’s health insurance — that is, if they’re even able to buy it. Obama’s economy has hurt young people considerably, so how are they supposed to “forget about the price tag?” — especially as the law increases the price of health insurance.
The administration thinks young people won’t notice they’re getting a raw deal, so long as the marketing is good enough. Obamacare cannot offer affordable health insurance, so the administration is trying to lure in millennials with patronizing ads and promises of free birth control and STD testing. This isn’t fooling young people. That is why they are so averse to Obamacare.
Young people don’t want expensive health insurance, and they don’t want to be patronized. They want the plans they liked (before Obamacare cancelled them), the doctors Obama promised them they could keep (which they can’t) and the medication they were prescribed (your drugs may not be covered under Obamacare). And they want to be treated like adults. Obamacare offers none of these, so millennials aren’t signing up. The administration is learning marketing cannot change how young people perceive the real effects of Obamacare on them.
Millennials aren’t signing up for Obamacare, not because it isn’t marketed enough, but because Obamacare hurts and patronizes millennials. Nobody would want to be treated in the way the Obama administration treats young people. No amount of marketing will change that.
