...The federal government wants to require young, healthy people to buy insurance because if they don't, premiums for everyone else will go up.This echoes a point I made in my article, "Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America" (The Objective Standard, Fall 2008):
Insurance companies need low-maintenance, young customers on their rolls so they can raise money to cover benefits for less-healthy people the health care bill will require them to insure.
..."If you charge people a fair price, then a 50-to-60-year-old should pay about six times as much as a 20-year-old," said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis.
But he noted that the Senate bill says older people can be charged only three times as much; the House bill says they can be charged two times as much. "So we're going to penalize low-income young people in order to lower the premiums for older wealthier people."
...Young, healthy adults are the most unjustly affected by mandatory insurance. These patients consume the fewest medical resources and therefore, under mandatory insurance, most heavily subsidize the costs of the older, more-frequently-ill patients.Mandatory insurance represents a huge forced transfer payment (or "taking") from young people to senior citizens.
Mandatory insurance robs them of money they could use for their own goals, such as saving to buy a first house or to start a business or a family. Hence, mandatory insurance forces them to sacrifice their lives and futures for the sake of the collective.
Could this be one reason that the AARP (the lobbying group for seniors) loves ObamaCare?
