Small government Rhode Islanders have a lot to dislike about HealthSource RI, the state’s ObamaCare health benefits exchange.  But never mind that the agency is spending public dollars to remedy much-lower-than-expected paying customers, but instead attracting many-more-than-expected free Medicaid recipients (including many in the non-expansion group for whom the federal government isn’t picking up the whole tab).

Never mind that it’s simply inappropriate for the government to take our money and change our laws in order to create a market space that it can fill with a $100 million start-up with no plan to pay for itself and nobody whose livelihood is really on the line if it fails.

Never mind all of that, because HealthSource has stepped into the realm of self-parody with regard to how invasive government can get when money is no object and behavior must be changed.   Welcome to HealthSource’s “Nag Toolkit.”  As Christine Rousselle of Townhall explains:

The website for the “Nag Toolkit” features tutorials to teach adults how to use the mobile apps Snapchat, Twitter, Vine, Tinder, and OkCupid to connect with their children. While Snapchat, Twitter, and Vine are apps mostly used for communication and sharing things with friends, Tinder and OkCupid are dating/hookup apps. The goal of the “Nag Toolkit” is to assist parents with bothering their kids about health insurance in places where children would not typically expect to find their parents.

So, parents, pick a “provocative username,” and ambush your children on social media, encouraging them to sign on to an overreaching top-down plan to rope them into dependence on government.  It gets even better, at the bottom of the page, where the government suggests that confused (or squeamish?) parents can just hand over their kids’ email addresses, and “we’ll do the nagging.”

We can only hope that such efforts have the unintended consequence of pushing young Rhode Islanders toward a gut-level distrust of government and lead them to rebel.

 

ADDENDUM:

On a more serious note, though, I can’t help but wonder how far off we are from a government that has our personal connections all mapped out in a database, which it can access when it needs to apply pressure for one reason or another.  How about when they can contact parents with all of their kids’ social media accounts in a list, for better pro-government online stalking?