Let’s say you’re young and you think you’re going to live forever. What would it take to convince you to spend 10 percent or more of your annual income on health insurance premiums?

Answer: Sort of scary ads!

Insurers participating in the new health exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act need young healthy people to buy insurance to help offset the costs of caring for the sick. Behavioral economists say the best way to convince these young people to buy something so expensive is to frighten them into thinking about what could happen if they don’t have insurance.

“You want to scare people enough so that they’ll buy the product but not so much that they’ll turn off the ad. If you make it too gruesome they’ll go, ‘I don’t even want to go into it,’ said Doug Hough, associate scientist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

Here are some of the best youth-targeted ads we’ve seen.

1.  ‘Paul Goes Water Skiing’

Minnesota’s exchange, MnSure, is running commercials starring a large, wooden Paul Bunyan. Takeaway: Even Paul Bunyan, symbol of American virility and strength, would likely need to see a doctor after this waterskiing accident.

2. Cover Oregon’s ‘Live Long in Oregon’

These commercials aren’t scary, unless you’re on LSD. They’re just eye-catching and catchy, with trippy visuals.

3. Cover Oregon’s ‘Fly with our own wings’

4. Oscar Health Insurance ‘You Never Know’

The ad from New New York insurer Oscar looks a lot like that viral video from last year, “Dumb Ways to Die.” The ad shows hip young cartoon urbanites encountering city pitfalls, like faulty manhole covers, bees stinging you while you drink coffee and squirrels biting your ankle where your slim-fit trousers meet your stylish brogues. These situations would be really gross in real life. Animation is a perfect illustration of Hough’s “scary, but not gruesome” maxim for insurance ads.

5. Colorado ‘If You Push Yourself, Protect Yourself’

This ad shows skateboarders pulling off feats of derring-do in a public park, with the tagline “This isn’t crazy. Crazy is doing this without health insurance.” We don’t have to see what a gory skateboarding accident looks like, but we are certainly going to be imagining it. Blech.

6.  ‘Daniel’s Covered, You Can Be Covered Too!’

From Healthcare.gov, a 22-year old Florida man tells how easy it is to sign up for insurance. This isn’t the most effective, IMO.

7. Daily Show and Harvey Keitel ‘Buy some f*&@ing insurance, New York’

When the exchanges opened for enrollment in early October, the Daily Show ran a fake ad where Harvey Keitel demands, not politely, that New Yorkers buy insurance. If New York state ran this as an actual ad, I bet it would work really, really well.