Like a cockroach that just won’t die no matter how many times you nail it in the face with Raid, Obamacare continues to limp along, pushed forward by overpaid bureaucrats, politically-motivated lawmakers and a president who either can’t admit his signature legislative failure or is too busy celebrating its preordained demise.
The Obama administration again took aim at millennials on Tuesday, rolling out a series of taxpayer-funded ads and social media campaigns to try and convince millions of 18-to-34-year-olds to sign up on a health care exchange that becomes more and more embattled every day.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Obamacare officials are desperately trying to lure more young people to join the teeter-tottering marketplace to offset the rising costs of insuring older folks. Currently, less than 30 percent of all Obamacare enrollees belong to this coveted age group, a pool of young people who are relatively healthy and whose funding is supposed to keep the larger Obamacare ark afloat.
But here’s the rub – Obamacare ain’t cheap. Four years into the ironically-titled Affordable Care Act, rising premiums coupled with high deductibles combined with marketplace instability have left many young people content to pay the law’s individual penalty than cough up hundreds of dollars each month for health care that doesn’t even kick in until their third hospital visit. (Sidenote: that penalty is currently $695 per adult per year, or 2.5 percent of your income. It’s literally legalized government theft.)
With fewer young, healthy people paying into the system and more older folks using their health benefits to the max, the federal marketplace’s health plans have become far too costly for many insurers, causing some of Obamacare’s biggest original players to check out of the exchange due to extreme financial losses.
Take millennial David Barnes, for example. Barnes wrote in the Washington Post Sunday why he has yet to sign up on the exchange despite being uninsured (and therefore legally required to get healthcare). According to him, it’s more efficient for him and other young, healthy people to just accept the Obamacare penalty. Why? He explains:
Last week I visited Healthcare.gov to scout out the most-affordable health-insurance plans I could buy for next year. In Arlington, Va., where I live and work, the cheapest option is $200 a month with a $6,850 deductible. Across the Potomac in D.C., the premiums are slightly cheaper but the deductible is still sky-high.
Now, to entice healthy young people who are obviously smart enough to recognize that a $695 penalty is better than shucking out hundreds of dollars every month, the administration is trying to convince millennials to plunk down their $30,000-a-year-plus-bartending-tips to support the government's woefully ailing marketplace. And how? Well, with the hashtag “#HealthyAdulting.”
#HealthyAdulting.
Because #SupportOurFailingProgramOrElse would just be too on-the-nose.
The ad campaign will allegedly focus on health issues young people supposedly care about, like reproduction.
This is a particularly spectacular case of why big government is a problem. And it doesn’t take a taxpayer-paid brain surgeon to figure it out.
Big government creates a problem that a whole bunch of people never asked them to fix. The big government’s “solution” ends up being crap. So the big government imposes further burdensome regulations on its people to continually fund their new “solution” to the problem that they created when trying to fix said original problem that a whole bunch of people never asked them to fix.
Maybe it’s time for a little less federal intervention, and a little more #HealthyGoverning.