Covered California Selects Key Demographics as Focus of Outreach

California's health insurance exchange has chosen specific demographics as the focus for its public outreach campaign, the Sacramento Bee reports (Mantz, Sacramento Bee, 7/24).

Background on Exchange

The exchange -- named Covered California -- primarily will serve individuals and small businesses.

Supporters hope that the exchange will function similarly to websites like Amazon and Expedia so that users will be able to choose among various health plans through an easily navigable online store.

The exchange is expected to open for registration in October (California Healthline, 6/27).

Need for Outreach Campaign

According to federal officials, California has the country's largest health insurance market and about six million uninsured residents, making it a crucial place for implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

The Obama administration seeks to have about seven million individuals across the U.S. enroll in state health insurance exchanges. Officials say that about 2.6 million of them need to be young and healthy individuals to help keep costs down for the overall pool of enrollees.

Nearly one-third of such young individuals live in California, Florida and Texas.

Meanwhile, the White House says that the ACA will give coverage opportunities to more than 10 million uninsured Latinos, many of whom live in California (California Healthline, 6/7).

Details of Campaign

Ogilvy Public Relations will conduct Covered California's public outreach and media relations campaign, while Weber Shandwick will be in charge of paid advertisements.

The campaign will focus on three key demographics for insurance enrollment:

• "Just getting started," focusing on state residents ages 18 to 24;
• "Independent and connected," focusing on more affluent residents in their late 20s and 30s; and
• "Calculated risk-takers," focusing on those who have higher income levels.

The campaign will cost about $106 million in fiscal year 2013-2014, according to the state auditor.

Anne Gonzales -- a public information officer for the exchange -- said the campaign also will deploy "multi-ethnic and multi-language" outreach measures.

Although the outreach campaign originally was scheduled to being in July, exchange officials have chosen to delay the initiative until closer to open enrollment in October (Sacramento Bee, 7/24).