An Awesome Superhero Video About… Obamacare?
by Amy Payne, Heritage Foundation, August 21, 2013
Would “an awesome superhero or action-movie style video” change your mind about Obamacare?
The Obama Administration has pushed Obamacare through porta-potties and bourbon festivals—and now it’s promoting a $30,000 prize pool for a video contest.
Young people may feel they are “invincible” and don’t need Obamacare, so the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has to convince them otherwise. It will award prizes to videos promoting Obamacare to young people. The Huffington Post reports that the prize money comes from “the Affordable Care Act’s education and outreach budget.” As Heritage has explained, the cost of educating the public about Obamacare is already “extraordinary—and questionable.”
The contest website, hosted by the group Young Invincibles, gives these ideas for contest entries (emphasis added):
- “An awesome superhero or action-movie style video showing how young people feel like invincible movie heroes. Cut back to reality to show us how, in fact, anyone can be hurt.”
- “A video showing all the (obviously improbable) situations in which young people can be hurt – a piano falling on your head, an angry eagle soaring into your face, a space alien attack … the weirder and more outlandish the better! Go big, but please remember to stay safe!”
- “Express the necessity for young people to have health insurance in a fun and memorable way through music”
It could be tough to convince 20-somethings to buy into Obamacare. It’s not such a great deal, after all. For many young people, it will be cheaper to pay the penalty for not having health insurance than to buy the government-approved coverage under the law.
But this is a problem for the Obama Administration—it needs these “young invincibles” to sign up and help shoulder the costs of the health care system.
Young adults “wind up losing from every angle,” explain Heritage’s Nina Owcharenko and Alyene Senger. Under Obamacare, young adults face:
- Costly benefit mandates: They must pay for benefits they may never use.
- Artificially higher premiums: Their health insurance premiums will be higher simply because they are younger.
- Trouble finding a full-time job: As more and more employers cut workers’ hours because of Obamacare’s coverage mandates, young people may find part-time jobs where full-time hours used to be.
Congress needs to defund Obamacare so that it can build a health care system that works—for young and old Americans alike.
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