Obamacare issues

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Obamacare’s rollout and the legislation itself is a hot issue. President Obama’s promise that we could keep our insurance and our doctors are proving to be false. A primary problem is that young people are not incentivized to sign up because it is not in their economic self-interest to do so.

For Obamacare to be fiscally viable, it counts on young and healthy people to sign up, which they count on to finance health care for the elderly. Since they are not signing up, premium prices will rise. According to National Policy Analysis, young people from the ages of 18 to 34 who do not have children and a steady income, benefit more from not signing up. It makes more sense for them to just pay the $95 or the 1 percent of their income penalty.

Many young people can stay on their parents’ insurance until they are 26. Why would they voluntarily choose to forfeit that and instead pay a high premium when they can least afford it? This assumption by Obamacare policy makers defies logic and human nature.

Obamacare is not structured to entice the young to sign up for it and therefore is not financially sustainable. In order to make it viable, incentives need to be tweaked. Policy makers need to make dropping the security of their parents’ insurance plan worth it to the young. In addition, most young people would rather pay the penalty than sign up for Obamacare. Due to the poor incentive structure, I believe Obamacare will not remain in its current form and will most likely implode. In a democracy it is up to us to let our representatives know how we feel about policies. If we do nothing we have no right to complain.

Calli Kern
Las Vegas

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