Is Obamacare dead? If not, it may be put out of its misery soon by America’s younger generation.
With no apparent incentives for young adults to sign up on the health care exchanges, it’s a safe bet that unless enrollment figures rise dramatically, the Affordable Care Act stratagem will ultimately fail — fail, that is, because it cannot attract sufficient numbers of young people
to the exchanges to subsidize the older, less healthy enrollees.
Obamacare is too big not to fail.
With more and more sick older folks enrolled, but few young’uns, up and up go premiums to dizzying heights. All that’s left to do is stand back and
watch the death spiral rise, right? Then watch it all come tumbling
down. Well, at the moment, it’s difficult to predict the future sequence
of events.
But why in the world would adults in their 20s — “Young Invincibles” or “Millennials” (ages 18 to 34) seen as essential for Obamacare to work financially — enroll on Healthcare.gov given the federal exchange’s poor performance, security concerns and high premium offerings?
Besides, many Millennials can stay on their parents’ health care plan until they turn 26.
Oh, and here’s one more reason why there’s no big hurry to sign up for health coverage now — the law forbids discriminating against anyone with a preexisting condition, so the uninsured can wait until they fall ill and land in the hospital before signing up for coverage. How convenient.
Obamacare’s true believers, who earnestly believed the president’s signature law would actually make insurance affordable for all, must be wondering what the hell happened to detour his signature achievement onto this twisted course.
