Obamacare is bad deal for the young: the whole purpose of the plan was to rope young and healthy people into paying for insurance they don’t use, freeing up money to pay for us older, and generally wealthier, folks.
The net result of two years experience with Obamacare is that enrollments are not keeping pace with targets, leading to rising insurance losses, as The Wall Street Journal notes:
Recruitment for 2015 is roughly 70% of the original projection, but ObamaCare will be running at less than half its goal in 2016. HHS believes some 19 million Americans earn too much for Medicaid but qualify for ObamaCare subsidies and haven’t signed up. Some 8.5 million of that 19 million purchase off-exchange private coverage with their own money, while the other 10.5 million are still uninsured. In other words, for every person who’s allowed to join and has, two people haven’t.
Among this population of the uninsured, HHS reports that half are between the ages of 18 and 34 and nearly two-thirds are in excellent or very good health. The exchanges won’t survive actuarially unless they attract this prime demographic.
In Colorado, a measure to junk Obamacare for a single-payer ColoradoCare system appears headed for the ballot:
With Colorado’s shaky Obamacare exchange in peril, some health care advocates are calling for voters to scrap it and replace it with something far more ambitious.
Proponents of a statewide single-payer health care system have submitted 156,107 signatures, far more than the 98,492 required to qualify for the November 2016 ballot, to the Colorado secretary of state’s office for verification.
Government-controlled health care was Obama’s dream from the start. The failure of Obamacare is just happening faster than anyone suspected.
Maggie Gallagher is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project.
