Wednesday, December 11, 2013

The kids are gettin' wise to Obamacare

Here's George Will back in July:
What Obamacare requires for it to work - mass irrationality, both on the part of employers to ignore that incentive and on the part of young people who are supposed to pay 3, 4, 5 times more for health insurance than it would cost them to just pay the fine and ignore it.
Witness the adverse selection:
There’s bad news hidden behind the White House’s latest optimistic Obamacare report.
Few people are actually paying for the healthcare plans that they’ve picked on the partially-fixed Obamacare website, say industry insiders.
Also, too few young people are joining the plans offered by companies using the Obamacare website, said Robert Laszewski, a plugged-in insurance consultant.
Older clients, aged above 40, comprise 60 percent of the new Obamacare customers at one of his client health-care companies, Laszewski told The Daily Caller.
The skew is “very, very bad,” said Laszewski, who is president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, Inc.
What about all those hip "young invincibles" in Colorado with their snowboarding and marijuana?
No state has made a more aggressive--or more idiotic--effort to recruit young policyholders than Colorado. The Centennial State has a Democrat-controlled government and its own insurance exchange, not to mention legal recreational marijuana under a 2012 initiative. The wacky weed doesn't make an appearance in the ungrammatically named "Do You Got Insurance?" ad campaign, but it does use beer, wine, sex and sports--as well as less glamorous pursuits like pumpkin carving and bicycling--in an effort to sell insurance to those elusive invincibles.
The result, according to CNN: "As of November 30, just 11% of total enrollees in Colorado's exchange fall into the targeted 18 to 34 age bracket. The majority of new enrollees--more than 60%--are between 45 and 65." Total enrollment is only a bit more than 15,000, far less than the 250,000 policies being canceled according to an early November Denver Post report.
Of course most of these young'uns voted for their own demise so maybe they're gullible enough to sign up.  But probably not.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, the kids. The kids will save you.

http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2013/12/09/millennials-are-the-leftiest-generation-since-fdr/

Eric said...

The thrill is gone, baby.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/millennials-abandon-obama-and-obamacare-20131204

Anonymous said...

Between that, the timely Latino outreach, and the "avoid saying 'rape'" seminars, the GOP can't miss!