WASHINGTON — Is ObamaCare making you sick? A cute baby panda might just change your mind.
As part of President Obama’s cranked-up effort to get the uninsured to join new health plans under the Affordable Care Act, the White House has been retweeting a Twitter feed called the Adorable Care Act in a bid to sway young minds.
“Don’t be a sad panda. Health insurance marketplaces open in five days!” says one post accompanying a big-eyed baby-panda picture.
A post accompanying a photo of four cuddly ducklings reads: “Get all your ducks in an adorable row. Visit healthcare.gov.”
Obama hawked that Web site in a speech to students in Maryland.
The White House re-tweeted the furry ObamaCare-friendly messages, but insisted it didn’t create them.
Organizing for Action, the outside group that promotes Obama’s agenda, says it didn’t have a role in the cutesy viral-marketing campaign either.
At midday Thursday, messages featuring kittens and elephants had only 240 followers on Twitter, a number that grew to under 700 at the end of the business day — not much for a social-marketing campaign.
There’s also a Tumblr posting with the photos.
The administration needs people to sign up — particularly the young and healthy — to make the expanded marketplace viable and keep everyone else’s bills down.
Meanwhile, Republicans continued to try to de-fund ObamaCare as the government inched toward a possible shutdown at midnight Monday over the issue.
The Senate on Friday is expected to send the House a “clean” stopgap funding bill without ObamaCare defunding.
Asked if the House would pass a similar measure, House Speaker John Boehner declared bluntly, “I do not see that happening.”
House GOP leaders are focusing on a wish list of legislative proposals — including defunding ObamaCare, along with a slew of environmental, regulatory and tax proposals — on a separate bill to raise the government’s borrowing limit next month.
A failure to pass that critical measure would lead to a default and send world equity markets haywire.
Obama laced into his opponents for taking on his signature reform — and went after the wealthy Koch brothers and others who have paid for ads urging young people not to sign up for ObamaCare.
“These are billionaires several times over. You know they’ve got good health care,” he quipped.
He claimed that signing up would be as simple as logging onto Kayak.com or Amazon.com.
“It’s like booking a hotel or a plane ticket,” Obama said, although some state-run exchanges feature a blizzard of competing plans with services that are complicated to compare.
In New York, applicants must choose among 10 insurance companies, each offering four levels of coverage.