Obamacare: Will Millennials sign up?

There are 2.7 million reasons why Obamacare could fail, said Karin Agness in USNews.com. That’s the number of “young, healthy” 18- to 35-year-olds the White House says must enroll in order for the law to work as intended. But will that many sign up? Premiums for 20-somethings could rise by up to 42 percent when the law goes into effect, and the fine for not buying insurance is as little as $95 a year. If young people decide to pay the fine rather than buy insurance, premiums will go up for everyone else, threatening the entire system’s survival. That’s why conservatives are enlisting youth in their “fight against Obamacare,” said Alex Seitz-Wald in Salon.com. The Heritage Foundation sponsored a BuzzFeed.com post last week stressing the law’s cost for the young and healthy. The Tea Party group FreedomWorks is encouraging young people not to buy insurance until they get sick or hurt, and then to take advantage of the law’s ban on denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions. They’re out to convince Millennials that “Obamacare is bad for the Obama generation.”

That won’t be as easy as they think, said Jonathan Cohn in NewRepublic.com. “Young people worry about getting sick,” too; a Kaiser poll found that 87 percent of them consider it “personally important” to get insurance, and 66 percent said they worried about medical bills. Young people on low wages will qualify for federal subsidies, so that a 25-year-old making $20,000 a year will likely pay only $42 a month for a basic plan. And the penalty for carrying no insurance will eventually rise to $695, making it an ever-less-attractive alternative. This law merely asks young people to “exercise a minimum of personal responsibility” for their own health care, said Andrew Sullivan in Dish.AndrewSullivan.com. Yet some Tea Partiers are urging the young to stiff the system. “Why is free-loading now a conservative value?”

Conservatives needn’t urge young people to sabotage Obamacare, said Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg.com. “This law sabotages itself.” The higher cost of health insurance for many young people is a clear disincentive to buying it—particularly since they can safely refuse to do so until they need it. Failure is assured when you design a law that “depends on people’s acting against their self-interest.” Whatever Obama or conservatives say, Millennials will vote with their pocketbooks in 2014. If they decide the law has “made buying insurance a waste of money, they won’t do it.”

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