Selling Obamacare: the weird, misleading propaganda behind the federal health care law.

• Author: Hemingway, Mark
• Position: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

It might seem odd that Joanna Coles, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, was invited to the White House for lunch. After all, why would the most powerful person in the world bother meeting with the editor of a publication that specializes in hot summer sex tricks and the year's most dangerous diet? Particularly on May 2, 2014, when just about every important political journalist was in town for the White House Correspondents Dinner, the annual gala where pols and press rub shoulders and bond over bottomless booze.

But Coles had a big favor coming to her. In 2013, she publicly pledged her magazine's ad space and editorial content to help promote the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. There are now more than 100 references to Obamacare on Cosmo's website, almost all of them glowing.

It would have been one thing if the magazine had exercised any degree of creativity or editorial tie-in while touting the law, e.g. "7 Tricks to Get Your Boyffiend to Sign Up For Overpriced Health Insurance--in Bed!" But alas, Cosmo's Obamacare headlines have all the joie de vivre one expects of diktats from the Ministry of Information: "5 Important Questions About the Affordable Care Act"; "Valerie Jarrett: 'All Insurance Plans Are Required to Cover Contraception'"; "What the Affordable Care Act Means for Women With Pre-Existing Conditions"; and the hilariously defensive "Fox News Wrongly Believes Obamacare is 'Advertising' in Cosmopolitan."

So instead of earning money for disseminating White House press releases, Cosmo settled for a cheap date in the West Wing. Other witting promoters of the law, like comedian Zach Galifianakis and his surrealist Between Two Ferns web broadcast, simply traded editorial space for a chance to interview the president of the United States.

But the main task of selling Obamacare has come with a massive price tag: nearly $700 million, which has created a veritable ecosystem of turnspits working to convince Americans that a government takeover of one sixth of the economy is a good idea.

The amount of taxpayer money involved is unprecedented. "Obamacare seems due to join Social Security and Medicare in one respect: as a public policy advertising phenom, a program that is reviled and perhaps eventually revered in political advertising for billions of dollars in ad spending to come," Elizabeth Wilner, vice president for strategic initiatives at Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), wrote in a press release last year.

Such government P.R. campaigns have become a regrettable staple of American politics, since the default attitude among those in power is that propaganda is only bad when the other guy does it. When the Bush administration got caught violating a statutory ban on "covert propaganda" by passing off fake news reports to local TV stations and paying a columnist hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote the "No Child Left Behind" law, Democrats were justly outraged. And yet, these days Democrats are untroubled that their own campaign to...