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March 25, 2014 at 02:02 PM
Last October, Late Night TV show “Jimmy Kimmel Live” sent a reporter out to do“man on the street” interviews, asking whether passersby preferred the term “Obamacare” or “The Affordable Care Act.”
Most of the people interviewed offered perfectly logical (to them, at least) explanations of why they thought the Affordable Care Act was much better than Obamacare.
It was a funny bit, but in the end, the ignorance of a program as pervasive and societally changing as ACA was just… sad.
Yet who can blame these hapless interviewees? Neither name is an apt description of what the plan is today. As it has rolled out, huge chunks of it have been deferred, redefined and de facto rewritten by the White House and HHS. Perhaps a name change would help. All it would take is a pen and a phone. I have a modest suggestion for the new name. Let’s call it “Jenga Care.”
The government would have to purchase (or more likely, appropriate) the name from Parker Brothers, of course, but what could be more descriptive? If you have played the game you will recall that 54 wooden blocks are stacked in 18 levels to form a tower. Think of the blocks as the individual tenets of PPACA and the resulting tower as the entirety of the law.
Players can remove a block from any level except from below the incomplete top level. Each subsequent player gets a chance to coax out a block, trying not to topple the tower. The game ends when the tower falls. This seems to me to be a much better analogy for PPACA, not to mention a more powerful visual. Imagine how effective it would be if we had the Jenga tower equivalent of a National Debt Clock.
