The dust is settling a bit after the administration released details Monday about who signed up for health insurance on the exchanges during the chaotic three months after they launched Oct. 1.
Just about everybody was watching to see how many young people piled in. Younger people are generally healthier, and their premiums tend to balance out insurers’ outlays for older, sicker people.
For Obamacare to work over the long haul, young people need to be a big part of the health insurance mix.
The administration ultimately hopes that about 40 percent of the people who get insurance through the exchanges will be young adults.
As the year wound down, lots of people enrolled. Many of them were young, but people ages 18 to 34 came in at just 24 percent of the total sign-ups.
Big deal? Maybe. Maybe not.
“Had we seen the numbers reversed, with strong young-people enrollment, that would have been a surprise,” says Matthew Eyles, an executive vice president at Avalere Health.
But the relatively low turnout of young people for coverage isn’t a shock.
People in generally good health will probably wait to sign up, unless there’s some particular medical care they’ve been waiting for, Eyles tells Shots.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe not.”
“Probably.”
Thus far, the hope going forward for this massive overhaul of an entire industry and expansion of the federal monster is predicated upon a “Kinda/Sorta” theory. Its proponents offer assurances that it will get better without providing any concrete reason for it to do so.
This piece concludes that the Medicare prescription drug expansion wasn’t popular at first either and just leaves that apples and oranges comparison hanging as some sort of proof. There is no reason whatsoever to expect young people who don’t need insurance to behave in the same way as seniors who do need their prescriptions.
Almost everything that the modern Left seeks to do is built on the infantile premise that it should happen merely because they want it to happen.
Can’t let pesky things like history, math, economics or reality get in the way of that.
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