Investor's Business Daily Editorial

May 22, 2012


The Obama administration just inked a $20 million deal with PR firm Porter Novelli to help promote ObamaCare.  Why do they need to promote a law that was supposed to get more popular once it passed?

According to news accounts, the multimedia campaign is mandated by ObamaCare as a way to educate the public about how to stay healthy and prevent illnesses.

Right. Like another $20 million will make a difference on top of the avalanche of public health news already out there.

A Health and Human Services official let slip the real reason, telling Roll Call that the PR effort is meant "to inform the American people about the many preventive benefits now available ... as a result of the Affordable Care Act."

In other words, this is more about burnishing ObamaCare's image before the election than meeting some public health imperative.

Plus, since the law passed, the administration has been relentless in selling it to the public.  As the Heritage Foundation notes, HHS pushed Congress to quadruple its public affairs budget.  It also spent $1.4 million for an online search ad campaign designed to drive traffic to the ObamaCare website.  And it worked extensively with liberal advocacy groups to sell the law.

Too bad none of it is working.  More than two-thirds of the public — including half of Democrats surveyed — want the Supreme Court to kill at least the individual mandate, according to a recent IBD/TIPP poll.

The public knows that ObamaCare is a disaster.

It's pushing up insurance rates.  It will force people to buy coverage they don't want, and push companies to dump tens of millions of workers into the government insurance exchanges.  And it will accelerate the country's drive toward fiscal Armageddon.

No amount of high-priced PR spin can hide any of that.