A January 27, 2015 four-panel comic drawn by Carolyn Belefski for the Obama White House shows a bearded cyclist and ends "But even he's not too hip for health care," with a panel pointing readers to HealthCare.gov.
What the comic prints
Four small panels around a center panel. The character is a young man with a big beard and heavy glasses. Each caption adds a joke about his habits, and the last one turns the joke into the pitch. The center panel gives the web address.
JOIN HIM AT HealthCare.gov
He rides a tricycle in the road,
His beard catches everything,
Only eats food that's “experimental”...
But even he's not too hip for health care.
Carolyn Belefski
CarolynBelefski.com
Who made it, and the rights
The White House under President Obama published the strip on January 27, 2015, in a series the archive's title calls ACA Comic Strips. The artist, Carolyn Belefski, signed it. The copy the archive uses is on the National Archives' preserved Obama White House website. Because the artist was an outside illustrator, the rights line is split: a U.S. government work, or CC BY 3.0 with attribution to the artist. This page credits her by name for that reason.
How to read it
The archive tags it as bandwagon. The joke sets up a person who would refuse anything popular, then reports that even he signed up. If he did, the reader's own reasons for holding out must be weaker. It is gentle and funny, and its hero suggests an audience of young adults who might not think insurance was for them.
The comic makes no claim about prices, plans, or penalties. It sells a mood. That is ordinary advertising technique, used here by a government to promote enrollment in a program it ran and had argued for. There is no factual claim in the strip to check. What a reader should notice is the speaker: a federal office, using an outside artist and a cartoon voice, to make a policy choice feel like a social one. The decision to enroll was the reader's to make, and the comic is one side's case for it.
The same White House used a different register, budget numbers and the line "pass it on," in the 2014 House of Cuts graphic.
Sources
- FRAME object record, ACA Comic Strips: He's Too Hip And He's Covered (HealthCare.gov), January 27, 2015. Issuer: The White House (Obama administration); artist Carolyn Belefski.
- National Archives, archived Obama White House website, ACA Comic Strips: He's Too Hip And He's Covered, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work) or CC BY 3.0, Carolyn Belefski for The White House.
