The title of this entry says it all…”Madison Avenue meets the Affordable Care Act (ACA)”. It was announced today (7/25/2013) that the White House has authorized spending $684 million on a massive, national “publicity, marketing, and advertising” campaign to help promote and educate on the ACA. According to recent surveys, more than three quarters of the uninsured population (the veritable targets of the ACA) know little to nothing about the law. Their confusion is likely fueled by various government officials squabbling over various tenets of the law, to say nothing of the early July announcement delaying the so called employer mandate provision of the ACA. Research conducted by the Associated Press discovered that the massive Advertising and Promotion budget will not necessarily be evenly distributed. The range of doled out dollars is from a low of 46 cents per capita in Wisconsin to a high of $9.23 per capita in West Virginia. Readers may find it interesting to note that Wisconsin opted to defer to a federally facilitated health insurance exchange (or marketplace); while W. Virginia decided to do a state-federal partnership exchange/marketplace.
