Obamacare advocates were doing their best to get a little creative for last Saturday’s “youth enrollment day”. Of course, groups pushing Obamacare on the younger generations have been forced to get more innovative as the coveted “Millennials” shun the President’s signature piece of legislation. Even if a few dozen Millennials were convinced to sign up during the national “youth enrollment” day, they wouldn’t have been able to do so because Healthcare.gov was down for maintenance. (Then again, how is an inaccessible healthcare.gov website anything other than typical?)
The push to get the youth to embrace big-government-healthcare has proven more difficult than the Facebook-savvy White House had originally anticipated. (And when we say “youth”, we mean people who are not riding on their parent’s healthcare until they are 26 years old… So, I guess we mean that “young adult” age-range of 27 to 32 years olds… Silly kids.)
In Colorado, there were the famous “brosurance” ads that featured frat boys selling Obamacare while simultaneously doing headstands over beer kegs. (Because nothing says “get covered” like alcohol-fueled acts of precarious physical acrobatics.) And how could we possibly forget the cleverness of “pajama-boy” gleefully beaming in his new-found dependency on government? Well, an Obamacare advocacy group in Texas reached deep into their bag of intellectual integrity to bring the effort one more disturbing tactic: A pub crawl.
Here's the screenshot from GetCoveredAmerica.org:
Got it… You’re sharing information. You actually didn’t have to say it twice.
In all fairness, a pub crawl might actually have been a good idea. A few shots might make Obamacare look a little less atrocious. “Get ‘em drunk, get ‘em covered!” That’s apparently the new motto. And, really, what late 20-something bar-goer doesn’t want a sales pitch about increased government? I mean, isn’t that the perfect place to hold a discussion about obtaining health insurance: in front of the shot-girl at your favorite dive bar?
So far the campaign blitz encouraging America’s youth to sign up for Obamacare has been insulting, demoralizing, and generally ineffective. The ads have focused primarily on booze, sex, and the lowest common denominator of younger generations. (Then again, maybe the ad creators know their target audience…) It’s almost as if a bunch of old guys with twitter accounts are sitting in a smoke filled room saying: “You know what I hear those young kids like nowadays?”
The truth is, Millennials won’t be won over by a few morons doing keg-stands, or a couple of well-intentioned pub crawlers. Obama might have won that demographic in the election, but that is largely due to the fact that liberalism looks good to young, invincible, college students that have yet to bear the burden of liberalism’s price tag. Isn’t it strange how their enthusiasm tends to dwindle when they’re asked to flip the bill for progressivism’s ideas? “Hooray for Obamacare!” they shouted in 2012. “Wait, I have to pay how much for healthcare? OMG!” they tweet after learning that their current insurance has been forced to up their premiums.
Unlike welfare, social security, food stamps, housing assistance, or any other number of liberal social programs, healthcare is a very visible (and very painful) cost. Especially to the generation least likely to be able to afford rising premiums. Unlike the other initiatives that liberals sell to young and impressionable college students, Obamacare is asking them to pay for reform with their own money rather than someone else’s wealth.
Gimmicky ad campaigns (and even pub crawls) are not likely to induce the American youth into paying for Obama’s redistributive healthcare policy. Big Government is simply less appealing when you're the person everyone expects to fund it.
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