4 ms·

"Obamacare is asking young adults to effectively subsidize the healthcare costs of older Americans." - so is every other goddamned healthcare system in the worl

• misnome 13y ago
  Right, this seems so plainly obvious... It's not as though "young adults" don't age.
• wmf 13y ago
  Hopefully those older people are making more income. Should the fraction of your income you spend on insurance increase, decrease, or stay similar as you age?
• mhurron 13y ago
  You know, it almost sounds like this ACA thing is some sort of insurance.
  • glenra 13y ago
    No, it sounds like it's a welfare program. If it were insurance, it would charge proportional to the expected cost of serving the relevant demographic group. But due to the "community rating" provisions, charging actuarially appropriate rates is illegal, so instead we're charging rates that are pretty much guaranteed to make health care even more expensive than it was before.
    • jrs235 13y ago
      I've heard the car insurance analogies which don't work very well. Perhaps a life insurance analogy would work better... Now everyone can apply and get life insurance regardless of preexisting/current conditions. To make it affordable the young and healthy will pay more than the statistical probabilities that they will die tomorrow. The elder will pay less. How is this sustainable except through ever drastically increasing premiums?
• mjn 13y ago
  Yes, the article conspicuously failed to "run" any "numbers" on this point (or on any point, for that matter). What are the risk profiles among different age groups? What kinds of distributions of risks are there? How did each group fare before and after the reform? What are the average expenses in different demographics and how do they compare to the premiums (in different demographic & income groups)? None of that is here, because this is not an analysis, but the "Forbes blog" formula: linkbait title, no followthrough. The article doesn't even mention the most obvious change, which is that the big policy change in Obamacare was removing preexisting conditions as a pricing differentiator. That has a fairly complicated set of results, some of which correlate with age, and some of which result in other kinds of pricing changes (such as a transfer from people who did not have major childhood diseases to those who did). How much? The article doesn't investigate, because it did not in fact "run the numbers".
• fleitz 13y ago
  The rates are quite frankly ridiculous. I live in BC one of the few provinces in Canada where you actually have to pay for insurance and the top rate for an entire family is, $1662 per year or about $800 for a single person, if you make less than $22K it's free. (No, we don't pay for it in taxes because we have lower tax rates than the US, and yes, our corporate tax rates are lower too) PS. As a percentage of GDP the US before ObamaCare and the Bush drug thing spent more money on public healthcare than Canada. Yes, rollback the clock 14 years, and you could have Canada's healthcare system for less than what you were already spending. For what you are currently spending you should have limo drivers pick you up from your home and take you to the doctor.
  • thedufer 13y ago
    > No, we don't pay for it in taxes because we have lower tax rates than the US, and yes, our corporate tax rates are lower too That doesn't follow at all. That could just as easily occur because your government skimps on other things. Do you have a ~$1 trillion/year military? Didn't think so. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but _someone_ is paying for your health insurance, and its probably some split between taxpayers, doctors, pharmacies, medical research companies, etc.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]