(REUTERS/Jim Young)
For a new Koch-funded front group for young people, money for medical bills apparently grows on trees.
Generation Opportunity, a nonprofit financed with $5.04 million from a fund controlled by the Koch brothers' lobbying team, just launched a new television advertisement to kick off an anti-Obamacare campaign. The ads, which provides no actual information about healthcare reform and instead seem designed to scare people away from doctor visits, have already been dissected by many in the media. What's more revealing is Generation Opportunity's real agenda, which was explained to Yahoo News in a story unveiling the new campaign (emphasis added):
Their message: You don't have to sign up for Obamacare. "What we're trying to communicate is, 'No, you're actually not required to buy health insurance,'" Generation Opportunity President Evan Feinberg told Yahoo News in an interview about the campaign. "You might have to pay a fine, but that's going to be cheaper for you and better for you."
So, the big idea here is that young people should decline health insurance? Having no health insurance is "better for you?" When a car accident happens, or someone is sent to the hospital needing critical care, who picks up the bill? For slash-and-burn Koch groups, that doesn't seem to matter.
Notably, the young men and women hired by Generation Opportunity are provided health insurance, says organization's communications director David Pasch, who spoke to TheNation.com over the phone. Lucky them.
Ethan Rome, the executive director of Health Care for America Now, says young Americans without health insurance will be "buried by bills and unable to recover for the rest of their lives."
"What they're advocating is seriously unconscionable," says Rome in response to Generation Opportunity's call for youth to go uninsured.
Read the rest of this article at The Nation
