I just saw an advertisement for Hartford Insurance on television. They are using Matt McCoy as their spokesman. The actor that portrayed Seinfeld's crazy friend Lloyd Braun. He is in his late fifties now.
I know that Lloyd Braun is an imaginary character, and Matt McCoy is a real person, but I just cannot separate them in my mind. It is a little delusional for Hartford to not know that nearly every viewer will make the same unconscious connection. That's the power of popular culture for you. That's why nearly everybody thinks Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house. It wasn't Palin; it was Tina Fey.
AARP as a brand has mostly avoided fallout from their political activities. Any senior who is a member is just bananas.
AARP was one of the biggest advocates for the passage of Obamacare. Seniors should have been burning their AARP cards in the street, because Obamacare cut $716 billion from Medicare to help pay for $1.9 trillion worth of coverage expansion for low-income Americans. That's nutty.
AARP has always been a stakeholder in Obamacare. The crony capitalism part is that Obamacare forces seniors out of Medicare Advantage, and onto traditional Medicare. To cover gaps in coverage, these seniors will have to supplement Medicare with Medigap insurance. If you guessed that AARP receives royalties from Medigap insurance, then you are not a kook.
Obamacare is like the old pantomime horse of vaudeville. The pantomime horse is a horse costume in which one actor wears the head and shoulders, and the other actor wears the rear end. Obamacare is the ass-end of the private system (insurance) stitched to the ass-end of the public system (Medicare). As Mark Steyn wrote, "Obamacare stitches together the rear ends of two pantomime horses and attempts to ride it to the sunlit uplands."
I look forward to viewing the lost episode of Seinfeld, where Lloyd Braun and George Costanza compete to see who can sell more insurance policies mandating pregnancy coverage to men. Serenity Now!
2 comments:
Want to buy some gum?
Am I crazy or is that a lot of gum?
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