Will $125 Million Help?
Nationalized health care is sinking in popularity--but a new big-money PR initiative hopes to change all that.
by Heather Wilhelm
Nothing but reruns on this summer? At least there will be plenty of political theater playing out on the national stage over the next few months.
This week, White House allies announced a $125 million PR play focused on winning hearts and minds for an increasingly controversial subject: Obamacare. “The extraordinary campaign,” The Politico reports, “which could provide an unprecedented amount of cover for a White House in a policy debate, reflects urgency among Democrats to explain, defend and depoliticize health care reform now that people are beginning to feel the new law’s effects.”
In selling the health care overhaul to Congress, the Obama administration cited a once obscure research group at Dartmouth College to claim that it could not only cut billions in wasteful health care spending but make people healthier by doing so…
The debate about the Dartmouth work is important because a growing number of health policy researchers are finding that overhauling the nation’s health care system will be far harder and more painful than the Dartmouth work has long suggested. Cuts, if not made carefully, could cost lives.
That last line’s worth rereading. Job-killing policies and bureaucratic waste aside, it cuts to the heart of the matter when it comes to the problems plaguing the massive new health care “reform”–and, ultimately, a problem that no PR campaign is likely to fix.