The recent landmark health care reform bill has received a plug from famed actor Andy Griffith. “The Andy Griffith Show” was the most popular television show in the 1960’s, and he has gone on to have a number of other successful ventures since that time. He is the spokesperson for Medicare’s $700,000 ad campaign.
Griffith will mostly be talking about Medicare in his advertisements, but will reportedly also be plugging the new health care reform bill as well.
“With the new health care law, more good things are coming — free checkups, lower prescription costs, and better ways to protect us and Medicare from fraud. See what else is new — I think you’re going to like it,” Griffith says in the ad.
The new bill was signed into law on in March of 2010, but will not be coming into full effect for a couple of years. The bill was not supported by most republicans, who said that they were worried about how much the bill would end up costing the country that is already deep into debt.
The new healthcare bill does have something in common with the original Medicare program, and that is that conservatives believed that the bill would lead the country into socialism. Medicare was referred to as “socialized medicine,” but Republicans when it first launched in the 1960’s, and the recent health care reform bill has received a similar treatment.
Medicare will be facing problems when the baby boomer generation retires.