Obamacare About To Screw The Young

Younger Americans are out of work, struggling with student loan debt and shackled to unpayable amounts of tax obligations to massive entitlement programs created by the generations which went before them.

And now Obamacare is set to give them a nice, hard kick in the pants.

State and federal officials and the health care industry are currently preparing to implement two specific ObamaCare provisions taking effect on January 1, 2014, acting on this politically perverse principle of shifting resources from your supporters to your opponents. The first is the individual mandate, which aims to force the young, childless, and healthy — “Young Invincibles,” as they are said to think of themselves — to buy heath insurance, even if they think (and even perhaps make a rational, if risky, bet) that they don’t need it.

The second is a lesser-known policy to limit the practices of charging different premiums to different ages, known as age-rating. Many states currently set a limit on this difference, often mandating that an old person shouldn’t pay a premium more than five times a younger person’s, even if she’s expected to use more than five times as much health care. The ObamaCare provision kicking in next January 1 would reduce that ratio to three-to-one, essentially limiting what the elderly pay in part by forcing young people to carry a larger share of the total cost of national health care.

Just another example of the “Affordable Care Act” making health insurance more expensive.

But you do have to admire the irony of Obamacare hurting younger Americans who, overwhelmingly, helped re-elect Obama.