By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, June 21, 2013
OK, young'ns, here's your chance.
In two consecutive elections, you've carried Barack Obama
to victory. When he said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for,"
he basically meant you. You voted for Obama by a margin of 66 percent to 32
percent in 2008, and, despite a horrendous economy for people your age, by nearly
that much again in 2012.
The president announced his candidacy in 2007 by
insisting, "This campaign can't only be about me. It must be about us --
it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion,
the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. ... This campaign has to be about
reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose,
and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices
calling for change."
And on the night of his re-election in 2012, he
proclaimed: "The role of citizens in our democracy does not end with your
vote. America's never been about what can be done for us. It's about what can
be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of
self-government. That's the principle we were founded on."
Between those two elections, the president pandered to
you like no president in American history. As I wrote last fall, he visited
college campuses more often than a Red Bull delivery truck. He's carried water
for you on college loans like an aqueduct. He made sure you can stay on your
parents' health-care plans until you're 26, which is a really nice consolation
prize when you can't find a job.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but you kids ate
that stuff up. It reminded me of H.L. Mencken's line about Harry Truman:
"If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he
would have promised to provide them with free missionaries, fattened at the
taxpayers' expense."
Whenever curmudgeons like yours truly suggested that
young people were getting caught up in a fad or that Obama was simply buying
votes at the expense of taxpayers, you'd have a fit. You'd insist that
millennials are not only informed, but eager to make sacrifices for the greater
good.
Well, here's your chance to prove it: Fork over whatever
it costs to buy the best health insurance you can under Obamacare. Just in case
you forgot, under Obamacare, healthy young people such as yourself not only
need to buy health insurance in order for the whole thing to work, but you have
to be overcharged for it. If you don't pay more -- probably a lot more -- than
what you could get today on the market in most states, Obamacare will come
apart like wet toilet paper.
Estimates vary and depend on how much you make and where
you live, but if you're buying health care yourself, your out-of-pocket costs
will probably be at least a couple hundred bucks a month, give or take. The
Kaiser Family Foundation's "subsidy calculator" estimates that a
26-year-old nonsmoker making $30,000 a year will pay $2,512 a year for the
"silver plan." Although, if you fill out all of the paperwork, the
feds could send you a check for about $500. If you smoke, the premium rises to
over $4,000. (The subsidy stays the same.) Also, the more you make, the more
your insurance will cost because the subsidies will get smaller.
Of course, the above is a pretty rosy scenario. The more
young people who don't sign up, the higher the premiums will have to be to
cover the costs of those who do. Many experts think the sky's the limit to how
high prices will go.
And as prices go up, the whole thing might go down.
Actuaries call this the "death spiral." The old and sick race to sign
up, but the young and healthy opt to stay out. That causes prices to go up, and
more people to drop out. And since the fine for not signing up is so much lower
than premiums, lots of people will just wait until they're sick before buying
insurance.
Now, that might be the smart play -- for cynics.
But you're not cynical. You didn't vote for Obama and
cheer the passage of Obamacare because it was the cool thing to do. You did
your homework. You want to share the sacrifice. You want to secure the
president's legacy.
And now's your chance to prove it.
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