In my last post I asked for your input on ads supporting healthcare reform. Trade organizations, companies, and political parties are trying to influence voters through this year’s largest public marketing campaign, and I’m not sure how many of them are thinking about Boomer women, who may hold the key to the campaign’s ultimate failure or success.
Now that we’re in the middle of this campaign, I thought we should look at some healthcare reform commercials together to consider which advertisers are more likely to win over the Boomer woman. In my last post, <a href=”I reviewed some ads in favor of reform; now we’ll look at some ads on the other side.
Ads opposed to healthcare reform
- An activist group called The 60 Plus Association has sprung up to fight healthcare reform and the AARP. Their fear-based ads strike me as more appealing to Boomer men than women. Do you agree?
- Each political party is fighting hard in this battle, and the Republican National Committee is running an anti-reform ad dressed up as a commercial for the too-good-to-be-true prescription medicine called “Reforma.” I think this ad is a better approach for Boomer women, since it appeals to both their skepticism (surely there aren’t really easy answers?) and sense of humor (especially when it means laughing at stereotypical marketing messages).
- An ad that strikes me as singularly unsuitable for Vibrant Women is the Club for Growth’s opposition ad. You might have thought conservative men loved England, but this ad exploits Anglophobia to scare voters against an English-style single-payer plan that the White House has not even proposed. This ad suggests to me that the most conservative political marketers (like conservative product marketers) are willing to ignore Boomer women entirely.
- I’ll finish with another slightly humorous approach, which strikes me as a better way to reach Boomer women. An ad campaign led by a former hospital executive works to scare voters about government intervention in their healthcare decisions, but personified that evil government in the form of…a 20-something nerd. An anti-elitist tone could turn many women off, but the generally sly approach could get them to give this argument a chance. What do you think?
Conclusion
We will continue to see marketing campaigns for and against healthcare into the fall. While the ads in favor of healthcare reform generally seem to deliver messages in a style that Boomer women appreciate, I remain surprised how few of these ads really seem to understand and speak to what might end up being the most influential voice (and voter) in this debate.
SCARING SENIORS
I find the ad suggesting that reform takes from seniors especially offensive because it describes what the current system of insurance company controlled health care actually does. In order to make their profit, insurance companies have fostered a hugely wasteful system that loads the effect of their poor management on patients in the form of ever increasing insurance premiums. Unless we take the waste out of health care, the experts estimate that it is a good 30% of our health care dollar, not even the government will be able to cover health care costs. By changing how and when care is delivered we can have a much more efficient and effective health care system. That is where the excess money from Medicare would come from, and unless we do this there will be no Medicare.
What is this waste? It’s the duplicitous and unnecessary tests and treatments that add nothing to benefit the patient, but since doctors and hospitals are paid by the procedure and don’t routinely share patient information, are often done. These tests can even kill. (Improving Healthcare Using Toyota Lean Production Methods, 2nd. Ed., Robert Chalice, p. 35).
How has this happened? Because the insurance companies control what care is provided by determining what they pay for. First, they don’t pay for preventive care, when most illnesses can be treated much less expensively, because that would require early payback of the money they collect for premiums. Instead, the reality of insurance company payments cause us to wait until someone gets sick to see a doctor. That would have made sense before modern science identified the causes of many diseases, but not now. Yet insurance companies continue to promote the outdated system and collect huge amounts of money for doing it.
Second, because they don’t value the communication and mental process required to make a good diagnosis, insurance companies don’t pay for significant consultation but emphasize tests, procedures, and prescriptions. They treat patients, doctors, and nurses like robots to be moved through the system as fast as possible.
We can do better. Other countries do, spending as little as half the amount the US does and covering everyone. You cannot tell me that the US can’t do that too.
Exactly, Sue. On every point. I’ve been “tweeting” for healthcare reform (@avivagabriel on Twitter), almost obsessively these days, to raise the level of our public health debate. So, now—it’s break time!
Beautifully written, too! I particularly appreciate your points about the importance of covering preventive medicine, and a return to the good old “doctor-patient” conversation where health issues were routinely probed in “relationship” rather than the bowels of an ion-emitting MRI machine!