Got Insurance? Essay Example

The signature legislative accomplishment of President Barack Obama’s two terms in office has been the development, passage, and implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This legislation has been enormously controversial, with President Obama’s political opponents decrying the ACA as a government takeover of health care and a step towards socialized medicine. While there are some valid criticisms to be made about the ACA and the problems that arose during its initial implementation, many of the criticisms about the ACA have been off the mark or even completely false. At its core, the ACA simply makes private health insurance policies available to more Americans, through a combination of tax breaks, expanded Medicare coverage, subsidies, and other initiatives. By getting more people into the insurance pool, proponents of the ACa maintain that insurance companies will save money. One component of the ACA that is crucial to its success is the need to get young adults to enroll. These enrollees, who as a group are statistically likely to be healthier than older enrollees, will help to spread out the risk pool for insurance companies. In an effort to convince young people to sign up for ACA-sponsored insurance, the federal government (through healthcare.gov) has sponsored a series of advertisements targeting this demographic group. This marketing campaign is designed to appeal to young people by using specific cultural references that the advertisers hope will resonate with the targeted demographic group.

Because this marketing campaign is specifically aimed at bringing young people into the ACA-covered insurance pool, it uses several familiar references from American popular culture (often referred to simply as “pop culture”). The campaign has several components; the first is fairly broad while the rest are more specific. The advertisements utilized in this campaign are based on the familiar “got milk?” print ads sponsored by the American Dairy Council. Instead of using the question “got milk?” these ads ask viewers, “got insurance?” Alon with co-opting the Dairy Council’s slogan, these ACA ads even use the same font, making the text of the ads that much more familiar. While the individual ads target different subsections of the young-adult demographic, they all share this common “got insurance?” question; also like the milk ads, the ACA ads follow the larger-typeface “got insurance?” with a smaller-typeface paragraph describing the specific benefits of the ACA for each targeted group.

Each of the individual “got insurance?” ads focuses on a specific benefit that young people will gain when they enroll. One ad, for example, shows a young couple standing next to each other; the young man has his arm around the woman, while she is seen holding a package of birth-control pills. This ad explains that through ACA-sponsored insurance, young women will have easier access to various types of contraception. Another ad from the “got insurance?” campaign offers a portrait of three young men, presumably college students, posed near a beer keg. One of the three young men is, in fact, doing a “keg stand” (A handstand performed atop the beer keg); next to the picture, the text of the ad reads “Don’t tap into your beer money to cover those medical bills. We got it covered.” A third ad features a picture of five young women, dressed for a casual evening out, and holding individual shot glasses filled with what is presumably an alcoholic beverage. The text of this ad reads in part “Flu shots keep us healthy. Saving money on flu shots leaves us more money for fun shots. We got insurance, now you can too.”

Each of these advertisements references activities or concerns that are strongly associated with America’s youth culture. The models in the ads all appear to be college age, and all are engaging on some form of activity –from possible unprotected sex to possible drinking to excess- that is familiar to a large segment of the American population. Because it is crucial for the success of the ACA that it bring as many young, healthy enrollees as possible into the risk pool. By appealing to members of this demographic with cultural references that are familiar, and by presenting these references in an amusing and humorous context, it is clear that the marketing team behind these ads hopes that young people will see themselves reflected in these cultural references and be prompted to enroll in the ACA.