$700 million spent on TV commercials about Obamacare

The healthcare reform law has been a boon to local television stations as record amounts of advertising dollars were spent to promote the law and, more often, to attack it.

Since the law's enactment in 2010, supporters and critics have spent $700 million on commercials related to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, according to the latest research from Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group. Both Kantar and the Television Bureau of Advertising, which represents commercial broadcasters, previously estimated that ad spending related to the ACA would top $1 billion by the law's fifth birthday.

The $700 million already spent includes money from insurers, state exchanges and HHS promoting enrollment in new coverage established under the law. But the lion's share of those dollars has been used for negative political TV ads, Kantar reports.

In fact, spending on negative ads beat spending on positive ones by a factor of 15 during the past four years, according to Kantar estimates. Of the $445 million of the sum that reflects political advertising, $418 million has gone to TV ads critical of the ACA, compared with $27 million going toward ads that support the law. That paid for a whopping 880,000 negative spots versus 58,000 positive spots.

Though ads have been tied to campaigns across 16 levels of elected office—from governor to president, comptroller to Congress—nearly all the spending has been at the local TV station level. Kantar collected data from all 210 local television markets in addition to 10 national broadcast networks and 80 cable networks.

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