Co-opting Hollywood to Teach and Encourage Enrollment in Obamacare.

Hollywood can be a very effective political tool for manipulating public opinion, whether the issue at hand is the "war on terror", "war on drugs", climate change, or, as in this case, healthcare. The California Endowment announced a  $500,000 grant for Obamacare education.  to Hollywood Health and Society, "a program at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center that provides entertainment industry professionals with accurate and timely information for storylines on health and climate change."  This grant will be used to educate television writers, producers, and others involved in television programming on Obamacare facts and implementation information so that they can produce prime-time narratives that encourage Americans to enroll.

“Our experience has shown that the public gets just as much, if not more, information about current events and important issues from their favorite television shows and characters as they do from the news media and online resources,” said USC Annenberg professor Martin Kaplan, principal investigator of Hollywood, Health&Society since its start in 2001, and founding director of The Norman Lear Center. “This grant will allow us to ensure that industry practitioners have up-to-date, relevant facts on health care reform to integrate into their storylines and projects.”