Podcasts

Why Obama’s public option health care plan is a bad deal for young adults

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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 MP3 file is here.

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.

Videos

Video of William Lane Craig’s opening speech from his debate on ID with Ayala

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Provided by ChristianJR4. If you have a youtube account, please subscribe to his channel

Here is his full opening speech in 3 parts:

You can get the full audio here at Apologetics 315. There’s a good discussion going on in the comments.

You can read more about the debate over on Bradley Monton’s blog. He is an atheist professor who served as moderator during the debate.

Here are Craig’s post-debate comments.

Related posts

News

Chinese researchers find that abortion results in 17% increased risk of breast cancer

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Story here from LifeSiteNews.

Excerpt:

Chinese researchers at the Department of Oncology at the First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University who conducted a case-control study examining reproductive factors associated with breast cancer found a statistically significant 17% increased breast cancer risk among Chinese women who had induced abortions.

Peng Xing and his colleagues also found that, although breastfeeding protected women from any subtype of breast cancer, an increase in risk of breast cancer was associated with having more children among women who delayed their first full term pregnancy (FFTP) until after age 25 and never breastfed.

The researchers studied 1,417 women diagnosed with breast cancer between 2001 and 2009, and matched them with 1,587 controls without a prior breast cancer history.

The report was e-published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

This number is actually quite low compared to the 66% increase documented in the previous study from Turkish scientists, but the LifeSiteNews article explains why the 17% number is so low.