Dive Brief:
- Health insurance payers have launched an advertising blitz urging consumers to join their health exchange plans before the year-end enrollment deadline.
- Insurers, state exchanges and the federal government have spent $194 million on ads appearing between October 1 and November 10, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
- WellPoint will have spent as much as $100 million by year end on ads focusing on young adults, whose presence will help thousands the cost of caring for older, sicker Americans.
Dive Insight:
While health plans are eager to bring on young, healthy Americans, when it comes to older, sicker Americans, they are ambivalent at best. For all of our sakes, let's hope that the health affairs manage to recruit a goodly number of the young patients they're after. If they don't succeed, things could get ugly quickly, with insurers withdrawing from the exchanges and crippling the main mechanism by which the uninsured are supposed to get covered.