Rhode Island has created a site to help parents learn how to log on to the newest forms of social media—so they can nag their kids about getting health insurance.
So if Tinder, Vine, and Snapchat suddenly see a ton of new older users from Rhode Island harping on health care, you’ll have HealthSourceRI and its Nag Toolkit site to blame.
The site walks parents through an app sign-up processes that may be confusing for them, all with the intention of getting young people insured by the March 31 signup date.
While it might be for a good cause, Nag Toolkit’s advice to parents includes some impressively obnoxious stuff, like signing up for Vine just to post videos yelling “GET HEALTH INSURANCE.”
This is also the advice given for Snapchat.
Probably, calling them on the phone and asking nicely might be a less insane solution. But perhaps there’s a larger section of health insurance holdouts who only respond to getting thoroughly embarrassed on nascent digital platforms.
The Nag Toolkit page provides clear instructions on how to use all these new apps, so it could be repurposed as a guide to help older people use these new communication tools even after the deadline has passed.
This unusual government initiative is just one of many unconventional techniques the people behind the Affordable Care Act are using to get people signed up. Earlier this month, President Obama appeared on on Zach Galifianakis’ web series “Between Two Ferns” to promote the ACA, and there’s a slick, GIF-filled website meant to attract the young and uninsured.
H/T Time | Photo via Flickr/Paul Hamilton (CC BY-SA 2.0)