UPDATED–Google Ad Words Win for the White House: Even They See the Value in “ObamaCare”

I’ve heard and read lots of hand-wringing from President Obama’s most ardent supporters that we (the left, right, and center) can’t have “serious discussion” about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“health care reform”) as long as people call it “ObamaCare,” which we do frequently at Cato. So basically, Obama supporters are going to stick their fingers in their ears and yell “LA LA LA” until we meanies stop–*gasp*–attaching the president’s name to his administration’s signature legislative achievement.

But what’s most interesting about this whole discussion became apparent to me today. I read another one of these complaints–about people calling the health care reform law “ObamaCare”–this morning, so I decided to Google “obamacare” to see who else was using the term, and in what context. Here’s what turned up in the search results:

It may be hard to see, so you can find an enlarged version here, but the number one search result to come back when Googling “obamacare” is Healthcare.gov. What that means is that the administration has invested dollars in a Goolge Ad Words campaign to pay for Healthcare.gov to appear in search results for “obamacare.”

So my question is this, hand-wringers: If the Obama administration is co-signing the use of the term “ObamaCare” by spending money on a Google Ad Words campaign, can we please get past the petty semantic games, and start talking about what’s so bad about this law and how to fix it?

Make sure to check out Michael Cannon and Mike Tanner’s Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It (Cato store), Arnold Kling’s Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care (Cato store), and Mike Tanner’s paper, “Bad Medicine: A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the New Health Care Law” (PDF).

Update

It occurred to me after posting this that, in the interest of fairness and truly fostering debate on this topic, I should include some resources from the other side of the health care reform debate. My top two would be:

• Paul Krugman’s and Robin Wells’ “The Health Care Crisis and What to Do about It” (The New York Review of Books; March 2006)
• Jacob Hacker’s “The Case for Public Plan Choice in National Health Reform: Key to Cost Control and Quality Coverage” (Institute for America’s Future, Berkeley University Law; January 2009)

Both of these papers mount critical and compelling cases for using government intervention to bend down the cost curve in the modern health care system–Cannon and Tanner’s Healthy Competition is the definitive free market response to Krugman and Wells, and Kling’s Crisis of Abundance would find many faults with Hacker’s thesis. But read up on all of them if you really want a comprehensive, in-the-weeds picture of the debate over how to fix the health care system.