With Obamacare as unpopular as ever, the Obama Administration is continuing its full-court press to impress upon the American people its alleged benefits. Hollywood, the NBA, and NFL have all been recent targets of the Administration, asking them to help promote the law.
So far, the effort to get professional athletes involved hasn’t been successful:
Asked about the congressional letter, NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said the league had not made any commitment to the administration.
“We have responded to the letters we received from members of Congress to inform them we currently have no plans to engage in this area and have had no substantive contact with the administration about [the health-care law’s] implementation,” he said in an e-mail.
It appears HHS Secretary Sebelius’ efforts to solicit donations aren’t so well-received, either:
[Republicans] have blasted Sebelius for soliciting donations on behalf of Enroll America, a large nonprofit organization with ties to the White House that is spearheading much of the ground-level work on enrollment. The controversy has given pause to some potential donors to Enroll America who are wary of wading into a politically charged fight.
Two other national sports leagues aren’t on board yet, either:
A spokesman for MLB acknowledged that the league had been contacted by the White House, but he said the administration canceled the meeting and that the MLB has not been provided with any information to make a decision. A spokesman for the National Hockey League said Friday that the White House postponed a planned meeting, and that it had not made a decision about a partnership.
However, it looks like the Administration is branching out beyond politics and sports to your local library. As Allahpundit noted, this is a good way to get the poor and uninsured on board with the law:
Don’t think of it as conscription, think of it as … repurposing. The more ubiquitous the Internet and e-readers get, the less use people have for libraries and thus the further away from their core function libraries will drift. In theory they’re still about book-lending but credit the feds for recognizing their growing role as places lower-income people can get online for free. Per Gallup’s latest, fully 43 percent of the uninsured have no idea that they’re now statutorily required by Hopenchange to seek coverage. If you’re trying to reach the poor to let them know that they qualify for health insurance subsidies — or, rather, that they don’t qualify — then this is a no-brainer.
However, for the constituency that’s truly needed for Obamacare to remotely resemble a successful endeavor – young people – this seems to be a poor strategy. Again, from Allahpundit:
As for the other big uninsured constituency, how many young adults do you suppose are hanging out at the local public library these days, ripe to be sold by the local librarian on why healthy twentysomethings should crap[throw] away what little earnings they have on unnecessary health insurance in an economy as tepid as this one?
There are a couple of good, and one very bad, things about this full-court press by the Administration:
On the positive side, it means all of the other efforts – media, political speeches, etc. – to convince Americans to like the law and participate in it aren’t working. Related, the Administration seems to be getting desperate, as October 1 and January 1 are not far off.
On the negative side, this is a wide net the Administration is casting for marketing and promotional efforts. There is a lot of money going into this effort, and lots of volunteers, low-paid employees in both government and the non-profit sectors, and media organizations promoting it. Fiscal conservatives have to be on our guard, and report everything we see, lest some of the efforts slip by unnoticed and unopposed.
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