In America’s fight over affordable healthcare, young adults in Colorado find themselves targeted by ads selling Obamacare with booze and sex — a low-budget social media campaign dubbed “brosurance.”

Produced by a pair of Denver nonprofits, the advertising attempts to reach a demographic vital to the national subsidized healthcare insurance pool: young healthy adults, known by some as the "invincibles." ProgressNow Colorado Education and Colorado Consumer Health Initiative released the series on Facebook and Twitter last month. Subsequently, Rep. Cory Gardner, a Republican from Colorado, confronted U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius about the campaign, at a hearing on Capitol Hill.

"Do you agree with this kind of advertising for Obamacare?” Gardner asked. "It's a college student doing a keg stand. That's a pretty big picture of a keg."

Brosurance: Young People Need Healthcare, Too
A series of ads has targeted the youth demographic in Colorado, selling the idea of affordable healthcare insurance with booze and sex. Doyougotinsurance.com

Although the administration had nothing to with the ads, according to Sebelius, the targeted demographic represents a lynchpin for the success of the Affordable Care Act’s national insurance pool, dependent on future enrollments of young, healthy ratepayers subsidizing older Americans. Adam Fox, a representative of Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, told National Public Radio his group spent $5,000 on the campaign. Its controversial hook soon won coverage by mass media.

"We wanted to make sure that we at least got a few seconds of their recognition," Fox said. "We've seen a huge response, positive and negative. Some people aren't big fans of the ads, but some are, and we've seen just a huge amount of website traffic and a lot of social media shares of the images themselves."

In one spot, three young men — dubbed “bros for life” — perform a keg stand. In another, a young woman in yoga attire drinks wine. One spot manages to combine at least two conservative boogeymen in one: a young woman with both health insurance and birth control. "OMG, he's hot! Let's hope he's as easy to get as this birth control," the ad reads. "My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers. I got insurance."

Although by most accounts cheeky, the ads attempt to reach a demographic critical to the success of national healthcare insurance, one with little incentive to join. Among those making more than $45,000 per year, the $95 tax penalty for skipping healthcare insurance may seem more appealing than a $200 per month private insurance plan.

In this “new” economy, younger adults may also balk at subsidizing their older, wealthier counterparts. Today, 36 percent of millennials, those born between 1980-2000, live with their parents, while young adults under 40 owe 76 percent of the $1.4 trillion student loan burden in the United States, according to Forbes. As reported by the Associated Press, nearly three-quarters of every new enrollee on the healthcare exchange in Kentucky is over the age of 35.

To win this key demographic, proponents of affordable health care are making the hard sell. However, Fox says they’ve succeeded in starting a “huge conversation about a lot of the different reasons to have health insurance.”

Now that Fox and his friends have run ads parodying the famous “Got Milk?” marketing from the dairy industry, look for future efforts mimicking Allstate’s “Mayhem” line of car insurance spots. What could go wrong?

Below is an interview of Adam Fox of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative on CNN discussing the campaign.