Last week, the White House announced that only 1.08 million people in the age range of 18-34 had signed up for the ACA health care exchanges, or about 40% of what they estimate is needed for the exchanges remain financially solvent without a taxpayer bailout. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post recently wrote a column trying to explain why this demographic segment (aka “millennials”) has, in his words, “abandoned” Obama. While the article perhaps has some insightful points about this generation and some comments about how the Obama Administration did not work to keep the youth engaged after the 2008 campaign, his assertion that the youth are more liberal than earlier generations (a characteristic that has generally been true of people during the 18-34 time in their lives going back at least 3 generations) and that they are “abandoning” Obamacare because he didn’t fight hard enough to put the “public option” in Obamacare appears to be the work of someone who is trying very hard not to admit that his opponents were right about the law.
Simply put, by now the fact that Obamcare is not, broadly speaking, a good deal for young people is pretty well established. The law, financially speaking, depends upon young people over-paying for insurance so that their money can be used to subsidize the old and the sick. In other words, the law depends on young people getting ripped off. Consequently, it should be pretty obvious that it is not in the economic interest of young people to take part in a system that is not a good deal for them (the individual mandate recognizes that Obamacare is not a good deal for many people, hence they must be forced to take part). Young people are simply responding to economic incentives the way that other people do (and always have), which appears to be a difficult thing for some people to accept.
Furthermore, the entire Obamacare structure was not even a workable piece of legislation. This is a fact that Obama himself continues to acknowledge as he unilaterally (and illegally) suspends and delays various provisions that either can’t work, or are horribly politically unpopular. The reason the structure can’t work smoothly (recognizing that whether something “works” or not depends upon one’s definition) is that it is trying to micromanage roughly 1/6th of the U.S. economy (roughly $2.7 trillion); a GDP number that only 4 countries in the world surpass. Countries that have tried to micromanage their economies to this extent have all failed economically. That the wheels have come off of Obamacare is hardly surprising, as this is what usually happens when grandiose plans meet economic (and in this case, political) reality.
That people like Milbank feel the need to come up with alternate scenarios for why young people are fleeing Obamacare reminds me of leftists a generation ago trying to find alternative explanations for why the Berlin Wall came down and communism in Eastern Europe collapsed. Rather than accept the obvious lesson that economic central planning was not a prosperous economic system compared with free market capitalism (and that forcing people to take part in such a system as the Berlin Wall was meant to accomplish is hardly the way to happiness), they preferred to be puzzled instead. Perhaps the idea that they could have been wrong, while those that they had derided as wicked, intellectual inferiors could have been right was too much to accept. Or perhaps they were genuinely surprised that all of the laws and repression could not overcome market forces in the end. Whatever the motivation, economic reality will always eventually intrude. When it does, it tends to upend, sometimes violently, the plans and assumptions of those who thought that they could ignore it. The proponents of Obamacare are discovering that now.