U.S. private health industry lobby group uses marketing and publicity strategies similar to Big Tobacco
Content
A major U.S. private health industry lobby group uses marketing and publicity strategies similar to Big Tobacco and other unhealthy commodity industry groups to shape public perception of universal care policies as negative, according to research co-authored by SPS’s Dr Nason Maani.
Dr Maani and colleagues found that the lobby group Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF) uses social media to influence negative public views on universal care. Its methods are similar to those deployed by industries such as tobacco, alcohol and ultra-processed food.
The study criticises social media platforms for enabling ‘health-harming industries large-scale opportunities to engage in tactics that protect their profits at the expense of public health’.
The new study – led by Kendra Chow from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine – was published in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health.
Dr Maani is Senior Lecturer in Inequalities and Global Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh. He works in the Social Policy subject area at the School of Social and Political Science.
Investigating the social media conversation on universal healthcare
The US remains the only high-income country without universal health insurance coverage. Around 31.6 million Americans are uninsured and the overall healthcare system is ranked last place to other high-income countries in terms of access to care, efficiency, equity and health outcomes (in spite of spending the most money overall and per person).
However, private, profit-driven healthcare companies would incur losses under a move to universal healthcare in the US.
In 2019, PAHCF, a private health industry lobby group, launched a campaign across Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram to generate opposition to universal healthcare policies in the United States. Dr Maani and his co-authors investigated PAHCF’s campaign and how it was designed to affect public conversation and perceptions around universal healthcare policies.
The authors analysed 1,675 paid advertisements and associated metadata shown to Meta platform users from May 2018-September 2021.
The findings showed:
- The PAHCF campaign received between 32,596,000 and 40,706,329 views from Meta users over the time period studied.
- There were five major themes throughout the adverts, with multiple themes often present in one advert to encourage American audiences to focus on how implementing UHC policies could harm them:
- The negative impacts of universal healthcare policies on healthcare in the US. This was the most frequent claim promoted, arguing that UHC policies would force Americans to ‘pay more to wait longer for worse care’.
- Infringement on individual choice and rule by the state
- Misrepresentation of legislative intent
- Promoting partnerships and fixing the current system
- Appealing to audience interests.
The adverts also targeted specific appeal groups by including visual representations of specific individuals, e.g. mothers with children, senior citizens, people speaking Spanish.
Taking a leaf from Big Tobacco to create doubt, fear and uncertainty
The authors said the communications strategies in this campaign mirror strategies by unhealthy commodity industries, e.g. tobacco, alcohol, and ultra-processed food, to manufacture doubt, fear and uncertainty about policy reform efforts.
Meta does not publicly provide the number of impressions and other data for all advertisements, such as demographic targeting. However, the authors hope to further investigate the interplay between social media as a relatively new advertising platform and the well-known communications strategies of industries seeking to protect profits at the expense of public health.
The authors said: “With the new budget bill that has just been passed in the U.S., close to 12 million Americans could lose their access to healthcare. Campaigns like Partnership for America’s Healthcare Future that use Meta’s advertising tools to target people and affect their voting behaviours around policy reforms like Medicaid are extremely important to pay attention to.”
They continued: “With Meta rolling back its fact-checking policies in the US earlier this year, along with the continued lack of transparency around political ad targeting, their platforms offer health-harming industries large-scale opportunities engage in tactics that protect their profits at the expense of public health. And by not regulating content on their platforms, while collecting huge amounts in ad revenue, Meta is also engaging with the same style of tactics.”
Dr Maani added: “U.S. life expectancy lags behind its peer countries yet its healthcare costs are the most expensive in the world, and it doesn’t provide coverage for all its citizens. This study offers an example of the pollution of discourse regarding health in the US, in which powerful vested interests seek to undermine support for alternative approaches.”
Read the full article in PLOS Global Public Health.
This story is adapted from the original version by PLOS.