Nonprofit executive overseeing the White House's Obamacare youth video contest is the disgraced ACORN group's former top lobbyist
Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, is a fixture in the political left's arguments about immigration and housing policy, but now his group is wading into Obamacare through an unusual partnership with the Obama administration
A liberal organization tapped Monday to manage a new federal government-sponsored video contest aimed at encouraging young Americans to embrace Obamacare is run by ACORN's former top lobbyist, MailOnline can reveal.
ACORN, the once-mighty Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, crumbled in 2010 just months after a video sting operation showed its employees advising activists posing as a pimp and prostitute on how to evade federal taxes and hide crimes including human trafficking and prostitution.
Congress voted officially to defund it shortly thereafter.
The far-left ACORN was also dogged for years by allegations – some proven, others not – that its street-level organizers engaged in widespread voter registration fraud.
In its heyday, ACORN's legislative agenda was managed by Deepak Bhargava, an Indian-born community organizer. Bhargava left ACORN in 2002 after holding the top government affairs position there for 10 years. He is now executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Community Change.
In 2013 that organization sponsored a new youth outreach arm called Young Invincibles, which announced a partnership on Monday with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Their joint effort will award cash prizes to the creators of online videos that convince millennials to sign up for Obamacare health insurance exchanges, which open for enrollment on October 1.
Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, a dentist who seldom minces words about Obamacare, said the Obama administration's connection with Bhargava's group shows 'desperation ... to sell this unworkable and unpopular program'
President Barack Obama's signature health insurance overhaul needs young, healthy people to enroll, in order to offset the cost of treating older Americans with more health problems
Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, who was among the most vocal Republicans during the 2010 battle over ACORN's federal funding, told MailOnline that the White House is risking a public backlash with its choice of partnerships.
'The fact that the Obama administration is putting a senior staffer of the now defunct and notoriously corrupt ACORN in charge of giving away cash to bribe young Americans into accepting Obamacare is cause for grave concern,' Gosar said.
'This new effort goes to show that the Obama administration will go to questionable lengths to force the American people into government run healthcare.'
Young Invincibles co-founder Aaron Smith told MailOnline on Monday that his group is 'an independent organization that operates under the fiscal sponsorship of' the Center for Community Change.'
But another Center for Community Change insider told MailOnline on Monday that Bhargava was personally involved with the agreement that lets Young Invincibles piggyback on his group's federal tax-exempt status.
'He's one-part manager, one-part showman,' said the employee, who asked not to be identified. 'And he's far too smart to let anything go on under his roof that he hasn't approved.'
Smith also would not dispute that IRS regulations require nonprofit fiscal sponsors to exercise substantial oversight over their dependent groups, and to assume responsibility for the legality of their activities.
Young Invincibles made its pitch in a statement Monday, saying that 'as many as 17 million uninsured young adults could be eligible for free or low-cost health insurance in the coming years.' Its video contest, which is co-branded with HHS, promises to award $30,000 to 100 winners in three categories.
Bhargava is equal parts manager and showman, an insider told MailOnline, focusing mostly on immigration issues but warming to the political organizing possibilities connected with implementing Obamacare
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius addressed a Young Invincibles-sponsored conference in Houston on Monday, telling organizers that 'educating young people about new coverage options requires an all-hands-on-deck approach.'
'For millions of young people,' she said, 'health insurance hasn’t been an option because it's always been out of reach – because it costs too much, or isn’t offered through a job.'
But the Newark Star-Ledger reported Monday that under Obamacare, about 106,000 people in New Jersey – mainly young families – will no longer be able to count on what has been the most affordable insurance option to date.
The state's 'basic & essential' policies, which often cost only a few hundred dollars per month, have 'made them the most popular option for those who don’t get insurance through an employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid,' the newspaper reported. 'About 71 percent of those covered by the individual health market have a B&E plan.'
Matthew Vadum, a conservative researcher who has written a book about ACORN, said millennials who listen to the Young Invincible pitch will one day have to 'wait in long, DMV-style lines to get heart surgery or chemotherapy as they do in Britain and Canada'
While the October launch date for the health insurance exchanges looms in 43 days, the Center for Community Change has been planning its Obamacare cheerleading initiative for months. The Web domain HealthyYoungAmerica.org, which the organization is using to promote the contest, was registered on May 29, online registry records show.
The contest's online pitch says that 'Young Invincibles and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have created a competition that will tap into the creativity and energy of young Americans while raising awareness about the new law and encouraging young people to take advantage of the benefits of health insurance.'
Broadly, the promotion is designed to discourage young Americans from thinking that they will be better off without purchasing insurance at all.
Economists estimate that the White House needs at least 2.7 million young adults between the ages of 18 and 35 to enroll in its health insurance exchanges in order for Obamacare's financial model to work as it was designed.
If too few register, there will likely be a financial shortfall since not enough healthy young Americans will be in the system to offset the spiraling health care costs of older, sicker taxpayers.
Conservatives warn that if a funding gap results, the federal government will be forced to resort to 'rationing' health care.
Matthew Vadum, senior editor at the conservative Capital Research Center and the author of a book about ACORN, told MailOnline that for most young Americans, the lure of cash prizes is small consolation if they end up with a poorly-run insurance plan that the government manages.
The Obama administration, he said, 'is offering cash rewards to aspiring young propagandists to produce videos and songs that make government-run medicine seem cool.'
'When they have to wait in long, DMV-style lines to get heart surgery or chemotherapy as they do in Britain and Canada, Obamacare may not look so cool after all.'
ACORN was known for organizing street protests - until it became better-known for advising a pretend 'pimp and ho' in the fnie art of human trafficking and running a tax-free brothel
Rep. Gosar said that employing a former ACORN executive's organization as a sales tool for the new health insurance law 'shows the desperation of the Obama administration to sell this unworkable and unpopular program to the very generation whose back it will fall on to foot the bill for it.'
The Center for Community Change was founded in 1968 in response to the decade's civil-rights upheavals. It reported raising more than $16.2 million during its most recent fiscal year, which ended in September 2012, according to records the group provided to the state of Colorado in connection with its fundraising license.
In two other recent fiscal years, the group's tax filings show that more than three-quarters of its donations came in amounts of $250,000 or more.
It has engaged in health care policy for nearly ten years, following on its decades-long focus on broader public health issues, immigrants' rights, and forcing lenders to write mortgages for low-income and minority borrowers.
IRS records reviewed by MailOnline show that in 2011 the California Endowment awarded it $65,000 to support campaigns organized 'around implementation of the health reform law focused on young adults.'
The California-based Tides Foundation, a virtual crossroads of progressive funding and policy initiatives, gave the group $90,000 in 2009, at the height of the national debate over President Obama's health care law, for 'work in the media and field mobilization on health care.'
Like President Obama, Deepak Bhargava has deep roots in organized labor. His boycott of Hyatt Hotels in 2012 came with muscle from the UNITE HERE hotel workers union and the AFL-CIO
The federal government is directly funding the cash prizes in the Young Invincibles video contest, out of the Affordable Care Act's education and outreach budget, The Huffington Post reported Monday.
Sebelius has a larger pool of money, $75 million, allocated for Obamacare public relations efforts. The $30,000 in prizes will come from a different pot of money.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has insisted that she, the IRS and the White House all have broad discretion in how to implement the Affordable Care Act, and she controls millions of dollars that can be used to persuade skeptical Americans
Bhargava and President Obama are not strangers to each other. The Center for Community Change chief was master of ceremonies for the December 1, 2007 Heartland Democratic Presidential Forum, during which then-Senator Obama told an audience packed with ACORN grassroots organizers that he would welcome their proposals after he was elected president.
'During the transition, we are going to call all of you in to help shape the agenda,' Obama said. 'We're going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for next presidency of the United States of America.'
A month after the 2008 presidential election Bhargava, also a member of the editorial board at the liberal magazine The Nation, delivered a speech urging progressives to prepare to partner with Obama.
'We are here because the crisis our country is facing demands big and bold solutions, not small and timid ones,' Bhargava said. 'The two roundtables today of community leaders, leaders of allied organizations and policymakers will take on the two great challenges of our time, building a new economy for shared prosperity and expanding our democracy. We will need to move from the politics of protests to the challenge of governing.'
Bhargava and his organization's spokespersons did not respond to questions about his relationship to the Young Invincibles project. But Vadum said the professional community organizer is a strong reminder of where President Obama came from.
'Having the slippery former ACORN lobbyist Deepak Bhargava hand out the cash' for the video contest, said Vadum, 'is just another way that Obama is rewarding his old buddies in the radical left-wing world of community organizing.'
The White House and HHS did not respond to requests for comment about their partnership with Bhargava's group.
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