One of the hinges for the success of ObamaCare, at least as I am reading it, is for the young and healthy to buy into the new system and sign up for ObamaCare in quite substantial numbers.
This is, of course, to increase the risk pool. In essence the young and healthy who need very little health care sign up to pay for others who do.
So the young now already pay higher auto insurance premiums as they obviously are a higher risk factor. Now they are asked to pay higher health insurance premiums not due to risk factors, but because the Insurance companies need the risk pool increased to keep rates for others less healthy folks reasonable.
So my question is this. Just how realistic do you think this scenario is, and what percent % of young adults you think will sign up?
I am thinking this is not realistic, does not take into account human nature of the young, and only a small (less than 10%) will sign up. Just wondering what others think.
PS……………not asking for a merits of Obamacare debate, just this one specific aspect.
In the case of young adults, they are signing up mainly to get catastrophe coverage. A young healthy adult may not need coverage for on-going health problems, but there is always the risk of auto accidents (with low-coverage drivers), sports injuries, or sudddenly finding you have cancer. The cost may be higher than it should, but they are not only supporting others, technically they are “pre-paying” for the future when they are the drain on the system. One stat I read says theaverage person consumes the majority of their health care costs in the first 6 months and the last 6 months of their life.
I guess the question is - how many young people, until now, ended up in emergency for a serious condition and no money, only to basically spread their costs onto the responsible, insured majority? Now that cost is spread to their peer group as well.
If young health single rates suddenly get too high, the limiting factor is whether it is substantially cheaper to simply gamble you’ll stay healthy and pay the penalty (sorry, the tax).
So that’s the question - how much cheaper is it to pay the penalty?
I don’t understand this statement. I believe the idea is that those young people who do not already have health insurance are being asked to get it, so it’s not a matter of “higher health insurance premiums”, but going from being uninsured to being insured.
I think it will be much higher than 10%. A lot of young people want insurance even if it’s not their #1 priority, and they’ll forgo it before they’ll eat nothing but ramen noodles. But if it’s affordable, great. Even healthy people may need birth control, flu shots, occasional antibiotics, etc.
I think that is the point of the mandate. They are not being “asked” to sign up, they are being fined if they don’t. So the choices are health insurance or a fine, i think a good amount will chose insurance.
The point some people seem to be missing is that the ACA artificially overprices the younger population. Under the law, the maximum spread between the highest and lowest age group cannot be more than 3:1, while the actual difference in claims is more like 5:1. In effect, the younger population is being asked to overpay in order to subsidize the older population.
It’s for this reason that young people are needed in order for the system to work, but it’s for this same reason that many are likely to forgo coverage.
I have a really hard time imagining the average young person making that kind of demographic calculation when deciding to get insurance. Individual health insurance is going to be easier to get, and less expensive, than it used to be. If young people see it as a reasonable and worthwhile benefit, they’ll get it.
I’ve been young and broke, and I predict the number of young people who fall into that demographic who sign up for ACA will be less than 10%.
They have no money, and being asked for an additional $80 or whatever a month for some nebulous “maybe” is a non-starter, and the penalty will be taken out of the refund (which most will be entitled to), so there won’t be any real pain.
For those who are not broke, but still young and not covered by insurance through work, I still bet it’s around 15% for the same reasons. Young people aren’t good at risk management, and generally don’t spend much time thinking about the future in any concrete way. Maybe they’ll feel the sting of the tax penalty, but I would bet that there are a lot of young, non-broke people who are living well enough on a cash basis who don’t deal with taxes, like performers, artists, wait staff and bartenders.
But, as stated in the post above yours, it’s well known that their participation is out of balance. Arguments about being a good person and the general welfare aren’t going to cut much ice with another substantial portion of young people, cutting the rolls further.
They’ll make a risk management calculation, and not purchase insurance betting that there won’t be any problems. And assuming the penalty is not overbearing, they’ll generally make the right choice, practically speaking.
My daughter, who already has an individual policy, will have her rates raise about $50 a month for a policy with a $5000 or $6000 deductible. The new policy has maternity coverage which the older one didn’t; I guess they all do now. However, I do feel she will be paying higher premiums for less coverage.
She knows I had cancer in my twenties, so she would not go uninsured, but the increase in premium won’t be easy.
If you’re a woman, you “need” to go to the doctor at least once every year. Whether it’s for a reneweal for birth control or medical tests or both. Do you know how much BC costs? The one that works for me happens to cost $100 a month off plan. If you’re telling me I can now pay $80 for health coverage and $20 for BC I’m going to jump all over that compared to $100 just for BC (and plus however many hundreds it would cost to see a doctor uninsured to get the script). After all, that’s just one doctor visit - I may get sick enough to need another.
I looked up what a personal healthcare plan was going to cost me before the ACA. I couldn’t believe it but they were all quoting over a thousand dollars a month for basic stuff (maybe it’s a NY thing that it’s so exorbitantly high? Even disaster coverage was $500 a month). If you tell me I can get a normal plan for a hundred bucks now (the calculators predict yes)? Mine. Mine, mine, mine.
I threw out my back once when I was uninsured before the “until age 26” thing came into play. I laid on my bed barely able to move for two days and prayed I could go to work on Monday so I could pay rent.
The planets aligned. I was much better monday.
I want healthcare. And people need healthcare more than they think.
I know quite a few uninsured young people, and quite a few are signing up as soon as they can. They are excited in part because it will open up some new career options-- they can now consider internships and startup jobs that would have previously been really difficult to pull of due to health care considerations.
This part is not actually true. For many young people the exchange plans will be more expensive than individual, unsubsidized health insurance was from a private insurer.
I’ve looked at several States recently and what the average price for a young person would be for a bronze/silver/gold plan, and the best plan was both more expensive and offered worse coverage than the quote I got from Blue Cross Blue Shield for one of their Lumos PPO plans. Usually by around $30-70/mo.
Now, the young people like the woman I heard call in to NPR the other day who has some chronic condition that requires expensive medication has a health insurance premium of $700 with the lightest coverage she can get to still get her medication covered. That’s really high, and she was looking forward to the exchanges because she indeed will have access to a much lower premium. But for uninsured people who aren’t actually already sick, and who are under 30 I don’t actually see that most of them will be getting cheaper plans than they could have gotten on the old individual market.
But the ones who could not afford the $150/mo or so I found in the Blue Cross PPO plans might qualify for a partial or full subsidy that would get their out of pocket premium costs much lower, for them even a lesser exchange plan would be better since they can actually afford it versus the Blue Cross plan. The people who could have paid for the $150 Blue Cross plan probably should not have been uninsured in the first place, and it’s questionable why so many of them are.
And men pay more for car insurance, although that’s now been remedied in Europe, but you can’t charge women more despite their being massively more expensive, living longer at expensively advanced ages, getting pregnant, taking birth control and so on.
One day the young will be old. In civilised countries younger people’s taxes pay for the care of the elderly, and they should eventually benefit too. And people seem to think men are there to pay for women anyway.
Because for so many years our insurance has been tied to employment, there’s something of a mindset that it must be tied to employment. That is, if Judy doesn’t have a job that offers health insurance, she’s unlikely to even look into getting a private policy, figuring that someday she’ll have a job that offers health insurance, and she probably won’t be too sick until then, maybe, hopefully. Private policies have been in the past largely for the self-employed, while those in jobs without insurance plans just go without. It’s viewed as the self-employed giving themselves insurance as part of their job!
The mindset is also visible in the thickheaded folks who keep talking about signing up for “Obamacare” and “what Obamacare pays” and “deadbeats on Obamacare”…a whole heaping lot of people think that Obamacare is *itself *a pay-for-your-health-care plan, like Medicare or Medicaid (or NHS on t’other side of the pond.) They don’t grok that the insurance exchanges are still private policy health insurance, only organized and potentially subsidized. It’s making my head hurt…maybe I need more Obamacare.
Trying to educate people that health insurance is something they can and should buy, even if their job doesn’t provide it…it’s taking longer than we thought.
But the young people I know personally are indeed very eager to sign up - mostly for the birth control.
The ability to spread incorrect information is huge. Young people do use a lot of services, especially when they’re affordable. You can get sick if you’re 25 or 55.
Don’t talk to me about probability either, insurance is about adjusting your risk profile, meaning you don’t know the risk of if you’re going to get sick or not.
Why isn’t the following a good strategy for a typically healthy young person?
Don’t sign up for coverage, and pay the penalty (assuming, as reported, that this is substantially less than the cost of coverage). If you develop some sort of non-trivial problem, you then sign up (one of the big selling points is “no denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions”). If & when you judge the problem to be fixed, you drop coverage until the next one arises.
