President Barack Obama phoned in to On Air with Ryan Seacrest on Friday to discuss the looming enrollment deadline for the Affordable Care Act, the latest in a series of viral stunts intended to encourage young people to buy health insurance coverage.
“You should go to HealthCare.gov and compare the prices that are available for various private plans. And they’re the same kind of plans that you’d get on the job that people are familiar with,” he told Seacrest, who also hosts American Idol.
Citizens must sign up for a plan by March 31 or risk not being covered by health insurance for the remainder of the year. Once this month ends, the next opportunity to enroll will be in November. Americans who cannot afford a plan with the help of subsidiaries and tax exemptions, however, won’t suffer penalties for not enrolling.
Almost one million residents registered for insurance last month, but the White House is still aiming to recruit two million more in less than three weeks. About 4.2 million people overall have found private health coverage through the new insurance exchanges since the infamously rocky rollout of the website last October.
Obama also took to the airwaves to set the record straight about his sartorial style. Earlier this month, former Gov. Sarah Palin criticized Obama’s weakness for the current situation in Ukraine, saying that while Russian President Vladimir Putin “wrestles bears and drills for oil,” people “look at our president as one who wears mom jeans.”
“I’ve been unfairly maligned about my jeans,” Obama told Seacrest on Friday. “The truth is, generally I look very sharp in jeans.”...If you say so, mom.
Update: Obama is both a manifestation and a beneficiary of all that's Kardashian in our culture:
[I]t was his political celebrity status that got Barack Obama elected in the first place, a politician of the very thinnest of resumes, whose new-age blather caused vapors in a press that was itself as filled with celebrity worshipers as the viewers they seek. There’s no reason to re-litigate two elections, but the track record of this White House can only give credence to the judgments of so many who feared a popularity-driven candidate with no experience and who was so clearly hiding an ideological streak at odds with the majority of his fellow citizens. Yet none of that mattered next to the dancing and the star-studded endorsements and the coolness factor.
It’s the modern equivalent of bread and circuses, entertainment by our leaders that is eagerly swallowed by unserious and uneducated segments of the American public.
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