Government-funded National Public Radio has a vested interest in seeing liberal programs succeed, as their funding could evaporate under a conservative administration. Given NPR’s heavy reliance on federal dollars, it should come as no surprise that they have weighed in on the side of the Obama administration in its decision to lobby sports leagues to promote the controversial health care law.
In a piece on the July 8th All Things Considered, Colorado Public Radio’s Eric Whitney highlighted the lengths the Obama administration is going to “recruit baseball teams and other sports franchises to help” push Americans into signing up for new health insurance exchanges. When it comes to the health exchanges, Whitney lamented that “polls show most Americans don’t understand how they’re supposed to do it” and how recruiting sports teams in the past “worked before.”
In a four-minute piece, NPR described how in ultra-liberal Massachusetts, the Boston Red Sox are letting the “state set up booth at games to explain the new law to fans." The program promoted one fan Amy O’Leary who supports the strategy, saying that, “I think that sports teams in general can be messengers of good information to a wide variety of people.”
The story then turned to Colorado, and the Rockies baseball team, which is “running television ads during Rockies baseball games that show people buying a health policy and then celebrating as if they’d run a sporting event.” To be fair, Whitney did briefly mention Republican opposition to the partnership with major-league sports, but the piece relied heavily on pro-ObamaCare advocates to push the program and how the White House “as of now has cancelled at least some of its meetings with sports leagues and potential partnerships.
“It could be tough to get through to young people who may not value having health insurance…We know we had to put an extra emphasis on the 18 to 35-year-old cohort,” Mandy Cohen, of the Department of Health and Human Service claimed in her push for greater advertisement with sports teams.
The piece ends with a quote from a Rockies fan who laments how the ads didn’t “explain clearly that people need to pay attention to the exchange when it’s time to sign up.” In the mind of the liberals at NPR, this may be an indication that more needs to be done to push ObamaCare onto sports fans across the nation.
