This podcast explains how Obama’s health care reform bill would require young people to buy insurance, while simultaneously preventing medical insurers from reducing their premium amounts in accordance with the lower health risks of young people.
The guest being interviewed is Aaron Yelowitz.
Bio excerpt:
- Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Economics, 1994.
- B.A., High Honors, University of California, Santa Barbara, Business Economics, 1990.
- Department of Economics, University of Kentucky, Associate Professor, July 1, 2001-present.
- Associate Editor, Journal of Public Economics, January 2004-present.
And you can read the paper that is being discussed in the podcast.
Excerpt from the abstract:
One of the most interesting questions about the health care overhaul now moving through Congress is how it would affect young adults. That legislation would force most or all Americans to purchase health insurance (an “individual mandate”) and would impose price controls on health insurance (“community rating”) that would limit insurers’ ability to offer lower premiums to low-risk enrollees.
Those provisions would drive premiums down for 55-year-olds but would drive them up for 25-year-olds—who are then implicitly subsidizing older adults. According to the Urban Institute, many young people could see their premiums double, whereas premiums for older adults could be cut in half.
[…]The irony is that Barack Obama won the presidency with 66 percent of the vote among adults aged 18 to 29. That’s a larger share than any presidential candidate has won in decades. Yet his health care overhaul could impose its greatest burdens on young adults.
This reminds me of young unmarried women voting overwhelmingly against marriage and family by electing big government socialists like Obama. This is not to even mention the 10.2% unemployment rate, which is worse for younger workers, as well as the massive national debt that will have to be paid for by young people. Why is that young people are so ignorant of economics that they vote against their own best interests?
Note: The Obama health care plan is also a bad deal for elderly patients on Medicare, since he is cutting 500 billion dollars from Medicare.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
ObamaCare and its counterparts in Tennessee, Maine, and Massachussetts do not address the real issue. Think about it. Why do we need health insurance to pay for health care in the first place? We do not use insurance to pay for food or gas.
Health care services are insanely expensive, and what we need are price controls.
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And what do price controls do? Well, they destroy people’s financial incentive to supply, and they srive up demand for cheap services or products.
Think of what happened when Carter passed price controls on gas – line-ups of cars around the block. It’s just bad economics to impose price controls, and it ALWAYS creates a shortage.
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