Health care TV ads uninformative

Organizing for America, a community-organizing group founded by the Democratic National Committee to mobilize supporters of President Barack Obama, recently asked its members to create and submit their own video ads in support of health care reform.

The prize was to have the ad shown on national television.

Of the 20 finalists, one ad included a man running on an accelerated treadmill while a counter showed health care costs rocketing up. Another showed a police officer refusing to prevent a robbery because a victim didn’t have police coverage.

The winner featured children in a park talking about how future illnesses would destroy their lives and finances because they weren’t covered.

Some of the submitted ads were funny. Others were genuinely heartfelt. But it is tough to argue that any of them really tried to grapple with any legitimate concerns about the Democratic health care plans.

That might be a tall order for ads that only last about 30 seconds. But this health care debate involves a lot of policy details, and it was disappointing to see that the ads produced lacked as much substance as the ads larger interests groups have been blasting the airwaves with.

So far the debate about health care has been a boon for television advertising in the states of pivotal lawmakers, including Indiana. None of that money is being spent on ads that move debate in a more informed direction.

Indiana has been a big target because of Sen. Evan Bayh, one of the centrist Democrats who may very well decide the fate of reform as debate moves forward in the Senate. Bayh probably seems like a ripe target for interest groups because he is up for reelection next year.

So far Indiana has seen 1,900 advertising spots at a cost of $1 million.

Both liberal and conservative interest groups have been playing pretty loose with the facts in their ads.

One ad that got a lot of play featured a Canadian woman describing how she had a brain tumor and had to go to the U.S. to get treatment.

Besides breaking down the Canadian health care system to a single anecdote, the ad seems particularly disingenuous given that none of the health care bills would create a system much like Canada’s at all.

The case can be made that television ads are supposed to be convincing, not informative, and they are too short to have much substance.

That is why it is easy to make the case that these ads should be ignored.