Obama uses popular TV, radio to pitch HealthCare.gov to Generation X

President Barack Obama pitched Healthcare.gov in interviews with three seemingly unusual outlets on Friday—a hip hop radio station in Raleigh, N.C., a sports radio show and a morning talk show led by "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest.

But it's not the first time the president has used popular venues to pitch the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to young Americans. Friday marked the second time this year Obama has appeared on Seacrest's On Air and Colin Cowherd's ESPN radio show, The Herd, to plug the law, and he's appeared on several other popular shows to pitch the ACA.

Speaking on Cowherd's show just days before the deadline to sign up for Obamacare effective Jan. 1, 2015, Obama made an appeal to young men, who he said tend to think they're indestructible. For an average of about $82 a month, Obama said members of that group could get high-quality health coverage, and also thanked athletes such as LeBron James and Magic Johnson for their public support and promotion of the law.

The president's recent interview with Seacrest aired Monday morning. Obama told Seacrest that increased competition on the exchange has been good for Americans: “People who do a little shopping can get an even lower rate that last year,” Obama said. “Once the thing started working, there were more options, there was more competition, and that drove prices down.”

Individual market-premium increases for 2015 were relatively tame and comparable to that of employer-sponsored coverage. The average 2015 premium increase across 41 states and the District of Columbia was about 6%, or 3.5% when only factoring in rates that have been finalized in seven states and D.C., according to PricewaterhouseCoopers' Health Research Institute.

Concluding the interview, Seacrest asked Obama to finish his sentence, singing “All I want for Christmas is…,” to which Obama playfully responded “for you to sign up for healthcare.”

Obama had previously discussed the law and its implications on the show, two weeks before the first open enrollment period under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ended in March. In that interview, the president urged people to visit HealthCare.gov to compare their options and sign up for coverage before March 31, telling Seacrest that “for a lot of people, they will find that for $100 or less, they can get really good health insurance—in some cases, it's going to be less than the cost of their cell phone bill or their cable bill.”

Also in March, Obama sat down with comedian and actor Zach Galifianakis on his “online video series," Between Two Ferns. Speaking to “the young people,” Obama pitched HealthCare.gov, which was then a young site. Galifianakis, who made for an awkward interviewer and seemed annoyed by the president's plug, teased Obama about the site's technical issues earlier in the year. Galifianakis asked him, “Why would you get the guy that created the Zune to make your website?” The Zune was a flawed MP3 player that Microsoft discontinued in 2011.

More recently, Obama appeared Monday on the Colbert Report, a satirical political show on Comedy Central. The president took over host Stephen Colbert's regular lecturing segment, “The Word,” instead calling it the “The Decree.” Reading what he said was Colbert's script, Obama jokingly explained the hosts' apparent plot to repeal Obamacare, though he affirmed his ability to veto the law, as the show dubbed him “POTUS Interruptus.”

Even if Republicans successfully repeal the law, Obama noted that he would have to replace Obamacare with their own plan, joking that if anything goes wrong, people will be complaining about “MitchMcConnellcare,” referring to the senate Republican leader from Kentucky.