Dontcha Know There’s Hope for the Future

The majority of 19 to 34 year-olds in this country are healthier than older citizens. It’s not a generalization. It’s a fact. It’s also a fact they balance insurance risk pools, which is why in order for Obamacare to succeed, young, spry, healthy people need to enroll, pay premiums and essentially subsidize the healthcare costs incurred by the majority of the marketplace: older or sicker folks who often have expensive medical needs and participants receiving free government benefits. In other words if Obamacare survives, the millennial generation will shoulder the bulk of the financial burden associated with healthcare. Dontcha know that’s what makes it affordable for everybody else? Yeah. Thank you, POTUS, for another opportunity to share responsibility.

At least for now, the freedom to choose whether or not to participate remains intact. Of course, there are “consequences” for not maintaining “essential” insurance coverage, but even so, millennials continue to opt out. Obamcare is plenty flawed, but the fact that young, healthy people are so critical to its success is what’s making it such a hard sell to those same young, healthy people.

You’d think it would be easy to convince a bunch “knuckleheads” that paying hundreds of dollars in premiums for services they neither need nor want is a fiscally wiser choice than simply making the cheaper Shared Responsibility Payment. The problem is they’re NOT a bunch of knuckleheads. In fact, if you consider the top four reasons revealed in a recent study on the cost of insurance for young adults, you’ll see millennials are pretty darn savvy in their approach to making healthcare choices.

1. Most young adults are in the healthy majority.
2. Being healthy does not entitle you to a breaks on the cost of insurance premiums.
3. Emergencies don’t necessarily cost less with insurance.
4. Based on calculated risks for the healthy majority of young people, being uninsured is five times cheaper than being insured.

Clearly young Americans are not (as some people would have us believe) passive, uninformed, helpless, irresponsible, incompetent knuckleheads who don’t know one end of a knife from the other. Call me crazy, but it seems when you make sweeping generalizations that “disparage an entire generation on national television” (Patrick Kane), you tend to piss them off.

Dontcha know when you try to persuade people to do something they don’t want to do, you ought to avoid insulting them? And dontcha know, when a philosophy major at the University of Colorado at Boulder defects to the right, there’s hope for the future? 

Patrick Kane, you are my hero.

© 2014 Just Another Ordinary Day by Antoinette D. Datoc

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