The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has paid Google to alter the search results of “Obamacare” and other related searches. For each of these terms, the Obama administration’s www.healthcare.gov site comes up first as a paid entry. An HHS official, quoted in a Politico article, confirmed that HHS’ attempt to influence what Americans believe and read about Obamacare is in fact, paid for by your tax dollars. The official stated, “We are using a bunch of search term[s] to help point people to HealthCare.gov. [It’s] [p]art of our online efforts to help get accurate information to people about the new law (i.e. [we] also use Facebook, Twitter, blogs and webcasts).”
Of course, this site proclaims that Obamacare will lower health costs, increase the quality of care, and reduce deficits while disregarding hard facts, such as the Medicare chief actuary projects that show Obamacare would shoot the cost curve upward by $311 billion by 2019 in relation to costs without Obamacare. The Congressional Budget Office has also found that the average American family’s health care premiums under Obamacare would increase by $2,100 per year in relation to what those premiums would be in the absence of Obamacare.
Manipulating the cost and actual benefits of Obamacare and altering the search results is just plain wrong. The fact that your hard earned money is used to support propaganda expanding the reach of government into your own personal life just makes it that much worse!
What does this mean for North Carolina? Will the incoming legislature respond to this potentially unconstitutional invasion into states rights?
Buying an ad isn’t exactly “altering the search results”, though I will agree it’s a pretty big slap in the face to have our tax dollars used to propagandize misinformation about a parasitic government program.
I don’t care. Better than using it to defend Saudi Arabia