For an administration that has added $6.5 trillion to the national debt — more than all 43 of his predecessors combined — $17 million is less than a drop in the bucket. The fact that he is spending that amount per month on promoting his wildly unpopular health care law should leave American taxpayers speechless.
The New York Times reports (h/t Breitbart):
From January until the end of March, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the HealthCare.gov site and administers the Affordable Care Act, will have spent $52 million on paid media, officials said. Conservative opponents of the law have concentrated their spending on ads focusing on Democratic candidates and sowing doubts about the viability of the law.
The usually supportive Times notes that this PR effort unfolded even as “Russian troops were rolling through Crimea.”
Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff and a foreign policy expert, was deployed on a mission to do media outreach. But the focus of Mr. McDonough’s calls to local talk radio stations was not geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe, it was health care.
Mr. McDonough chatted with Andy Baskin and Jeff Phelps, hosts of a popular sports talk radio program on WKRK-FM (92.3) in Cleveland, about the coming N.F.L. draft, basketball at the White House and his days playing college football in Minnesota. Mr. McDonough then pitched a new website featuring games, videos and superstar athletes explaining the benefits of health insurance: a sports-themed portal to HealthCare.gov.
It is understandable that he would want to hawk his legacy legislative initiative, but he’s doing it on the backs of hard-working Americans, 53% of whom expect healthcare in the nation will get worse under Obamacare.
Here’s a video on this “misappropriation of funds” from Inform:
