To cleanse the palate, via Red Alert Politics and Ace, skip to 19:30 for five minutes of corporeal poetry that’ll change the way you see soaring premiums and taxpayer bailouts. Evidently, the people at California’s O-Care exchange thought the way to nudge twentysomethings to sign up was to hold a six-hour online telethon that kicked off with Richard Simmons and a guy in mom jeans and a shirt from 1972 trying to out-dance each other. Which raises a key question: How is Richard Simmons not the worst-dressed person in this clip?
Ace makes a fair point that, in the age of viral media, there’s little difference between bad publicity and good publicity. If the point is to catch people’s attention so that they start thinking about insurance, it doesn’t really matter if your clip is brilliant or the health-industry equivalent of “The Star Wars Holiday Special.” Right, but … six hours? Did they think the three people who watched any significant chunk of this would be on the fence for the first four hours, only to capitulate in hour five? They would have done better virally at a fraction of the cost with some dumb “Doge” Twitter riff on ObamaCare than with this car crash. “So adverse selection. Much death spiral. Very single-payer. Wow.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member