Over at the Amazon Daily Washington Post, Sarah Kliff has a great piece about the young people who are trying to persuade their peers to not sign up for Obamacare. Funded by conservative groups like FreedomWorks, these college kids are doing their best to keep young people out of the insurance marketplaces, which will drive up insurance premiums for everyone else. They are even co-opting a bit of Sixties counterculture symbolism in an effort to drive their message home. They invite people to burn their “Obamacare cards” as a gesture of civil disobedience. But like a lot of conservative attempts to borrow from youth culture, this effort has all the forced awkwardness of Mitt Romney showing up at the Pitchfork Music Festival in a faded Replacements T-shirt.
Let’s set aside the fact that Obamacare cards don’t exist, which requires activists to mock up and print out their own cards for burning. They are trying to draw parallels between refusing to participate in an unpopular war and screwing yourself over by not obtaining health insurance because freedom and stuff. Maybe I’m underestimating the potency of their message and in the fall we’ll see wall-to-wall coverage of people taking a lighter to their fake Obamacare cards. But I’m guessing that most Millennials are smart enough to figure out what’s in their best interest.
