The Obama Administration’s Desperate and Troubling Attempts to Enlist Aid in Promoting the Health Care Law

It seems clear from the outside that the Obama Administration and its allies feel that the health care law is deeply misunderstood. Even before the bill made it through Congress, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi famously argued that the law needed to be passed in order for people to get a chance to understand what was in it and the President claimed that his greatest mistake was in not explaining the bill well enough to the public. None of their considerable efforts to “educate” the public about the law, however, have made a dent in public opinion. In fact, recent polls show that 52% of the public disapproves of the law (http://www.pollingreport.com/health.htm) and 48% want their governors to oppose implementation, compared to only 41% who want their governors to support it (http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/health_care_law). It doesn’t help, of course, that for the past several months, report after report and estimate after estimate have indicated a growing consensus that the law will drive up health care premiums, increase unemployment and underemployment, cause millions to lose their health insurance, lead to a shortage of medical care, and add to the budget deficit. Adding to the problems are growing concerns that the law will fail to attract the millions of young, healthy people into the system who need to overpay for their health insurance so that they can subsidize care for the elderly in order to make the whole thing even slightly workable. As we get closer and closer to the date when the law is supposed to be fully implemented, the Administration has been engaging in a variety of seemingly desperate efforts to promote participation in the system, which have ranged from the bizarre to the ethically suspect to the vaguely sinister.

Perhaps the most publicized effort to try to improve support from the public for the law over the past few months has involved the strange request by Health and Human Services to get the NBA and the NFL involved in promoting the program. Luckily, both leagues declined, apparently realizing that involving themselves in politics in order to promote a divisive and unpopular law would not be good for their profit margins. That has hardly been the only idea that the Administration has come up with, however. While some, like the one to get librarians to encourage people to sign up (http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2013/jun/28/nations-librarians-help-health-law/), seem more odd than anything else, others have very clearly crossed important lines. Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, solicited donations to a group promoting enrollment in the program from companies that her agency regulates (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/04/sebelius-defends-obamacare-fundraising/), a clear ethics violation. Nothing bothers me, however, nearly as much as the pilot program being launched in Los Angeles to enlist children to persuade their parents to get on board.

Nearly one million dollars of taxpayer money is going to be used in a program to get students to promote the President’s signature legislative achievement. I found this quote from a school district spokesman to be extremely troubling:

‘“Teens are part of a ‘pilot’ program to test whether young people can be trained as messengers to deliver outreach and limited education to family and friends in and around their homes,” said Gayle Pollard-Terry, a LAUSD spokesman, in an email. “Teens will be educating adults that they already know (e.g., family or friends) and not other adults.”’ (http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2013/06/20/california-schools-train-kids-sell-obamacare)

We send our children to public schools so that they can learn the things that they will need to succeed in life, not so that the government can try to persuade them to any particular ideological viewpoint nor try to use them as tools with which to “deliver outreach” to parents. I get a little queasy anytime people try to use their children to send a political message, but it is a thousand times worse when it is the government trying to use other people’s children to bring political propaganda home to their parents. It is a first, tentative step along the path that leads to the type of youth organizations that we have seen under authoritarian regimes around the world. Hopefully, it is not something that will go any further, and I am sure that no one involved in the program is thinking in those terms, but this is the kind of line that citizens of a free country need to be very diligent about ensuring that the government does not cross.