Jennifer Hudson and Funny or Die’s Mike Farah were both among the celebrities who met with the Obama administration earlier this summer to brainstorm ways to teach young people about the Affordable Care Act. One of the fruits of that meeting, apparently, is a new Funny or Die video released last week that parodies ABC’s hit show Scandal. Only, it’s not that funny.
The PSA stars Jennifer Hudson as Lydia Cole, a “fixer” in Washington D.C. who’s sent across the city to address various “scandals.” Predictably, each of those “scandals” can be solved by different parts of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act.
A father whose son is out of college and doesn’t have health insurance? Well of course he can stay on his parents’ plan now! A woman whose employer’s health plan doesn’t cover mammograms? She’s covered under new women’s preventive service provisions. A cliched senator whose mistress is pregnant and uninsured? No problem, Hudson explains in the video, directing him to whitehouse.gov.
Young, healthy Americans have been the prime target of all kinds of Obamacare advertisements over the past few months, since their opt-in is expected to be a major factor in the success of the exchanges. They’ve run the gamut from cute to bizarre to creepy. This one was disappointing for Funny or Die, which has produced some really hilarious stuff over the years.
It does, however, do a better job than many of the ads I’ve seen at explaining some of the pros of Obamacare for young, healthy people.
But will people actually watch it? So far it’s gotten 30,000 views — a small fraction of the 5.7 million views collected by the Justin Bieber episode of “Between Two Ferns” posted on the same day.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
