Sunday, December 15, 2013

Medical TV Show Obamacare Ads

I wonder how long it will be before President Obama’s Hollywood friends start making Obamacare ads from popular medical TV shows from the past. There are plenty to choose from, and they’d make easy ads (in fact, I can’t believe they’re not doing them already!), like for example:

House: Gregory House has a new dilemma on his hands this time, because while he can diagnose the patient, the insurance company will not cover the treatment. What’s the cure? Obamacare!

ER: Someone is in critical condition, having been badly injured. But they have no health insurance, so they may not be able to save them. Wow, if only they had Obamacare! (And too bad the website is such a train wreck, otherwise the family could sign them up during treatment. Oh well, I’m sure it’s the only life that may be lost due to the Obamacare rollout screw-up, right?)

Quincy/CSI: Someone is dead, and the forensic team must find out why. What killed them? Why, they didn’t have adequate insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions through Obamacare!

General Hospital: (Okay, I must admit I don’t know a lot of characters from General Hospital, but here’s a general idea: an overwrought soap opera plotline.) A doctor’s lover’s husband dies in the hospital as the doctor’s patient, so the lover is incensed, blaming her lover. Oh, but he didn’t even get to treat her husband, because he’s not with the insurance that the husband has, so he wasn’t even allowed to treat him. So the doctor tells his now mourning lover: “I couldn’t help it: he didn’t have Obamacare! If only he’d had Obamacare, I could have saved him!” (But actually, everything turns out for the best, because now she’s rid of her husband, and he was rich, and so the lovers get married, and now the doctor can retire without having to accept the low Obamacare reimbursements without any tort reform to lower the liability insurance. So Obamacare saves the day for them, but not in the intended way.)

Now, obviously some of these are jokes, and in any case this is a bunch of hogwash as far as I can tell, because apparently, if the news reports are to be believed, more people will likely lose access to doctors and hospitals rather than gain access through Obamacare. But hey, this is political advertising, so like politicians, it doesn’t have to be honest or accurate!

But isn’t this the obvious direction for Obamacare ads? President Obama has a lot of supporters in Hollywood, so I would think medical show Obamacare ads would be de rigueur by now.