Remarket and Rebrand

Barack Obama doesn’t see anything wrong with Obamacare that can’t be fixed with a new and better ad program, and that’s a problem.

Battered by criticism over the troubled launch of Obamacare, President Obama said this week he is still confident his aides can fix the hobbled website. But he stressed, “We’re obviously going to have to remarket and rebrand” the program.

What it means is that he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that insurance premiums are going through the roof. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that millions are losing the health insurance they want … and their doctors. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that young people are not signing up numbers that are needed to make the program viable. The problem with Obamacare is not fundamentally an image problem, it’s a design problem and the website is the least of its flaws.

When New Coke was a flop, Coca Cola didn’t blame it on poor marketing, they quickly understood that people didn’t want it and brought back the old Coke. When Johnson &Johnson found out that somebody was tampering with Tylenol they didn’t focus on marketing and branding. They didn’t run ads telling people not to worry, only a few people would die; they recalled the product and fixed it so that tampering was no longer possible.

That comment about “remarket and rebrand” is incredibly telling. It says that people simply don’t understand Obamacare, that his problem is a "glitch" during its  introduction and a few weeks of bad press. It tells us that we’re there is not going to be any focus on fixing it, instead there will be some shuffling of dates to get past the next election and a 24/7 focus on getting the compliant press to ignore the problem.  It's as of J&J handled the Tylenol poisonings with an ad campaign emphasizing it's effectiveness as a pain reliever.  In Obama’s mind, Obamacare is perfect the way it is.

It makes me curious to see what information he’s receiving about how the rollout is actually proceeding. It makes me wonder if he’s delusional or being deluded.  It's disturbing that after 5 years as President, his actions are so irrational that we're still not sure what to make of him.