Government contracting and how much stupidity can $5B buy?

There’s a government Request For Proposals out for a 7 year, $5B advertising contract by a division of Health and Human Services (Centers For Medicare And Medicaid Services) to create advertising/marketing/digital media to get people signed up for Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and to get your flu shots ^[1]. Believe it or not, the government spends more on this than the Army spends to recruit people willing to die for their country.

Here’s the crazy part, they think that if they are successful at recruiting more people to enroll, they’ll save lives and make people healthier.

There was a pre-bid zoom this week, I sat in, not because my small ad agency can handle a $5B contract, but because which ever mega corp gets the contract, they are by law, required to have 3% participation by Service Disabled Veteran Owned Businesses like mine. I was hoping to become a sub-contractor.

Note, despite the epic size of the contract, the original Statement of Work was a clear and concise 10 pages (as compared to a recent RFP by Dayton Public Schools that was 58 pages over 15 documents).

Not very long into the presentation, I stuck a question in the chat, just to wake these people up and make them think (I can’t find the link to the call record so I have to do this from memory):

“Instead of confusing the public with Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, Part-B, Part-C etc, why don’t you just simplify it to “AmeriCare” and enroll everyone, and allow them to opt out instead?”

Which someone quickly responded to with something snarky like”It sounds like you are advocating for Medicare for all, and that’s not what this is about.”

Of course it’s not about something as simple as actually trying to enroll everyone into a health care plan, no, the government needs to make it super complicated so as to be able to spend $5B on marketing- instead of health care.

Sort of like why we are going to spend $20B+ on election advertising this season to auction off public office to the highest bidders.

In the meantime, American’s are dying because they can’t afford insulin, don’t have access to proactive doctors visits, and the leading cause of personal bankruptcy is a cancer diagnosis. Yep, don’t fix the problem.

Here’s the thing, if an American gets shot and shows up at the hospital, they will get treated if they have insurance or no-insurance. The costs just get scrambled around and make those of us who do pay for insurance pay more. The people getting rich aren’t even the doctors- it’s the Insurance Industry, the Managed Care Benefits Managers, the pharmaceutical companies- and it costs all of us way too much for really pathetic health outcomes.

So, yeah, why doesn’t HHS want to just cover everyone and be done with it (except of course the illegal immigrants who are swarming across our borders to steal our jobs). And why don’t we just skip the elections and sell the elected offices to the highest bidders and put all the money into actually supplying health care to Americans instead- and save us from the really bad political ads (note, the HHS ads we were shown were actually really good).

The key to effective marketing is often the simplest messaging based in truth, which can be condensed into a strategy that will generate results. It’s really not that hard to sell the right health care decisions to people if instead of selling insurance, you sell health care. The latter is what we need, the former is what the insurance industry wants you to believe we need.

And $5B is a shit ton of money to maybe just start a demonstration project to prove that proactive universal health care is actually a lot more affordable than the construct we have now.

Maybe the fact that I’m a veteran, who gets his health care from the largest health care system in the country, much more cost effectively than what you get, taints my viewpoint on this whole thing? And maybe, that for once, a stupid government rule about having to include someone like me on the contract- might actually get this conversation started. And, then again, who knows, 2 weeks ago, we were having to hold our noses thinking about picking a president between two geriatric fossils- and now, we’ve got a bold new future with a possibility of electing the first black woman president.

We live in interesting times my friend.

And I wrote a little soul song about us getting sold out.