The other shoe, or at least, the other red footie pajama, has finally dropped on Obamacare. We’ve been waiting for weeks to find out not just how many people signed up for insurance before January 1st, but what their ages are. All those healthy young Americans are expected to pay for benefits they don’t need, to cover the cost of benefits for older and sicker people, who run up big medical bills. So far, the numbers don’t look good. Through the end of 2012, nearly 2.2 million people signed up for Obamacare. That’s less than half the number who got cancellation notices on their old insurance. Meanwhile, more than half of those who did sign up are older than 45. For the program to stay afloat financially, it needs at least 40 percent of the enrollees to be age 35 and under. So far, only about 26 percent of the enrollees are that young. The government is trying to put a happy face on it. They say the surge in enrollments at the end of the year proves that interest is growing. Or it might just prove that Americans waited until right up to the deadline for being forced by law to sign up. Now that they’ve seen how easily the Administration will cave on deadlines and hand out exemptions, that buying surge could deflate pretty quickly. Health care expert Robert Laszewski of the Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review blog said word is getting around that they can’t force people to buy insurance, and he expects a political groundswell will lead Congress to get rid of the mandate. In fact, the White House just created yet another exemption, ordering that volunteer fire departments won’t have to comply. The cost of providing insurance was about to force many of those firefighting groups to disband, so that was a good decision. But it’s just one more signal to other threatened industries that the government will fold under political pressure. There’s even talk now of the White House having to bail out insurance companies if this program doesn’t miraculously start working. That’ll go over big with voters: the same politicians who got their insurance canceled are now going to use their taxes to bail out the insurers. Somehow, I don’t expect the political pressure over Obamacare to let up anytime soon.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 02:30:00 +0000
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