2.5 million young adults insured due to ACA

Different issue.... notice I did not say there should not be serious healthcare reform... in the particular case we are talking about, I believe their parents often would end up paying the bills.

 

A lot of these threads turn into massive self-congratulatory celebrations.

The self-congratulators act like 'Oh well I did it so everyone should do it' but they're being disingenuous because they really believe that they're exceptional.

Just being a more efficient herd animal doesn't make you a lion.

 

In what way are you footing the bill here? The parents can keep them on their insurance - but they are paying for it.

 

Some of the "uninsured bums" out there-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/10/2266-veterans-died-in-200_n_353033.html

 

No, it is not the same thing.. I am talking about ADULT 26 year olds being covered under their parents insurance, even though they graduated nearly a decade earlier. If you want a system that provides medical care to every citizen, I am all ears... if you believe that basic healthcare is a right, then I tend to agree with you.

However, I will not agree with a policy that extends childhood even longer... a 26 year old should be independent and we are screwing our future with the way we have raised young adults to think their parents or government will take care of them.

You can try to take a single policy and say I do not not want universal healthcare, or healthcare for the elderly or veterans.... you would be wrong, but if it helps you feel better about yourself, so be it.

Further, you can use an example of worst outcome all you want, but in most cases we are discussing routine office visits, etc. If the issue is the cost of care, then address that...

I have to hire young attorneys and CPA's as part of my job... it has gotten to the point that these 25 year olds have been hand fed by this culture that they will make 200K a year and not have to work hard. I even have had them take their parents to interviews.

Ultimately, I believe it sets a bad example... but to each their own.

 

Yes, and in your day, you had to walk 2 miles uphill both ways in the snow to go to school.

Please shush it up brah...... and honestly I'm probably older than you, but solving of - or actually, just having a nuanced understanding of - issues with healthcare economics are a lot more complicated than this kind of "KIDS 2DAY HARRUMPH HARRUMPH HARRUMPH" claptrap.

 

It extends it because those in their early 20s are the highest level of uninsured. They voluntarily forgo insurance because they are rarely sick and don't make much money to begin with so they think why buy insurance. Without them in the pool balancing out those that are sicker and create more claims the system is broken and insurance premiums skyrocket.

The mandate that everyone must have insurance fixes at least this problem, i.e. you can't have a system that forces the hospital to care for you (EMTALA) without a mechanism in place to ensure you pay for the care you receive. Everyone must pay into the pool who can benefit from ER care. If you allow those 20 somethings to continue to go uninsured and they break their leg we all as taxpayers eat that bill. Better to allow them to stay on their parent's insurance because you know the mandate was such a hit with the cons.

Obviously the conservatives thought people being responsible enough to get insurance and contribute was heresy. Better to let them continue to bankrupt hospitals which we bail out yearly through our tax dollars via the Medicare DSS.

Funny enough EMTALA was a piece of Reagan legislation. Imagine the government forcing a private company to hand out goods and services to people even if they don't pay. If Obama tried something similar we'd never hear the end of it.

 

Okay, thank you for a well thought out response. My question is how many of those that are in their mid 20's without insurance have parents with health insurance?

Regardless, I appreciate you actually discussing the issue instead twisting the issue or simply dismissing my concerns.

 

I'm still trying to figure out what the negative is here. The "kids" get better insurance than an individual plan would give them, probably for similar cost, and it's not at all subsidized by anyone. All this has done is allow more people to be covered efficiently.

The fact that health care is tied to employment is ridiculously inefficient and just locks people out of getting good health care. This helps address that problem to a small extent.

 

And people who support unlogicutional ideas should be left ... to cry.

 

The negative is that it is tied to the parents, it is part of a pattern I have noticed of adults in their mid 20's still being dependent on their parents. I find it odd that a government program would support this. I believe the lack of independence of younger adults is bad for everyone involved. I have noticed more and more people believe that their parents or the government is a safety net.

I can see where you are coming from that essentially more of the population is covered, so it is a win-win situation.

I agree, health care should not be tied to employment.

 

But it's the parents' choice. The parents now could just give their kids the money to buy more expensive, crappier insurance, but that's just less efficient. Nothing here is making the kids more dependent on their parents.

Besides, many of these people don't have the option of getting good health coverage outside of their parents right now. If your employer doesn't provide insurance, you're stuck with crappy individual insurance or no insurance at all. Or, if you had medical problems growing up, you're probably stuck with no insurance, period. And if your employer does provide insurance, you're not going to be on your parents' plan anyway.

The 2.5 million additional people covered here were not under any insurance before. It didn't convert people from their own insurance to their parents' insurance.

 

This +1

What is still problematic without universal coverage is you lose your job you lose your coverage. It's just beyond stupid to obligate employers to take on such a huge financial burden. Not to mention small businesses can't afford it and risk losing talented employees to companies that can offer better benefits.

There is a very good reason that every other industrialized nation does not rely on employers to bear this cost and use some semblance of a socialized system. In a global marketplace you have huge cost disadvantages between American firms and other countries. GM spends more on healthcare than on steel and has something like a 5 Billion dollar cost disadvantage compared to Toyota.

The whole concept of health insurance is just absurd the way it is structured in this country.

Imagine you could set your house on fire then call State Farm after it's burned down to write you a fire policy and then force them to cover the claim. (Employer based insurance) Or you burn your house down have no policy don't care to get one and call KB Homes to build you a new home, which they are forced to do. (EMTALA) Finally imagine you get into 3 at fault accidents and 2 DWIs and you have State Farm. State Farm then raises the rates for everyone equally even those with a perfect driving record because of your accidents. (Employer based insurance)

Health insurance does not work because it does not follow the rules that makes insurance as a concept work. Other countries clued into that decades ago but the knuckledraggers that infest the US never seem to get it.

 

Even worse, I think, is that you can't just pay for that same insurance outside of an employer. If I work for Intel, I get great insurance. If I get laid off, why can't I simply pay the insurer directly to keep my insurance? It doesn't cost Intel anything. And the insurer gets 1 additional client at a price they were making money at. And I get to keep my insurance. Everyone wins, yet it's not allowed.

 

(The above assumes the employer based system exists. In an ideal scenario, we'd just blow it up and not run any insurance through employers, as you suggest.)

 

Wouldn't that just be what COBRA allows? Except that you can't do it forever.

Problem is what an employer pays in premiums is a lot more than the portion typically charged to an employee. Paying let's say Aetna for your Intel insurance directly without the employer picking up a majority of that cost would be prohibitive.

At my company an employee with family costs the plan about a thousand a month. The employee is only charged like 50 bucks and that's pretax.

 

Absolutely - COBRA does it for a while, but the time frame is limited. Many people, especially when you're older and lose your job, can't get any other private insurance due to pre-existing conditions. So when COBRA runs out, they are screwed. My parents went through this a few years back, and they'd have been happy just pay that premium out of pocket to keep the insurance they had - while expensive, it wasn't as much an issue of finances for them, but of being unable to get any insurance at all.

 

Nancy Pelosi once had trouble finding a babysitter. So her aspiration these days is "doing for child care what we did for health care reform"—pushing a comprehensive solution. In fact, it's not just an aspiration—it's at the top of her agenda.

This sounds like an absolutely wonderful idea. But if "we" really are going to do for child care what we have done for health care, the U.S. will have to take some intermediate steps in order to replicate the experience faithfully.

(1) First, the U.S. should create a labor shortage by launching a major war and drafting men and women to fight.

(2) Then it should impose wage and price controls, as Washington did during WWII, to prevent employers from bidding up the price of labor. (That would further drive up the prices for war materiel, which would be costly and inconvenient to the government. The Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, for instance, stipulated that its aim was "to assure that defense appropriations are not dissipated by excessive prices.")

(3) The president—Barack Obama, presumably—should then establish a War Manpower Commission with the power to forbid people to change jobs, as just such a commission did during WWII. This will prevent individuals from skirting around the wage controls by quitting one job to take another that pays more.

(4) Practices such as these will encourage employers to compete for scarce labor by offering non-wage benefits. During WWII, employer-provided health coverage was one such benefit. It is reasonable to assume employer-provided child care would be another one today.

(5) To facilitate the spread of employer-provided child care, Washington should grant it preferential tax status, as it does with health care. The IRS should back this up by declaring that child-care benefits do not count as wages.

(6) To further ensconce the third-party-payer system, the National Labor Relations Board should declare, contra the IRS finding, that child-care benefits do count as wages for the purposes of collective bargaining (just as it did with health coverage). This, combined with the favored tax status, will encourage labor unions to push for extravagantly generous child-care policies for current workers and for pensioners.

(7) Washington then should enact two major new entitlement programs akin to Medicaid and Medicare, guaranteeing government-funded babysitting for the poor and elderly. Washington should produce wildly low-balled estimates of the future costs of such programs.

(8) While all this is going on, the states should impose complex bureaucratic oversight of the child-care system—especially a "Certificate of Need" program through which bureaucrats, rather than the free market, would decide whether new child-care facilities are needed and may be allowed to open. That way, existing child-care facilities will have government allies in their attempts to limit competition that might hold down costs.

(9) Likewise, professional child care associations should lobby Congress for market-entry barriers requiring providers to obtain highly restricted licenses for performing even the most mundane procedures.

(10) Meanwhile, politicians at both the state and federal level should propose a host of various mandates on employer-provided child care—requiring such programs to pay for trips to the zoo, cultural institutions and parks; to cover weekend child care for romantic parents' getaways; and to cover full-time au pair services for parents of children with special needs. This will help drive up the cost of insurance even faster.

(11) As the share of GNP devoted to child care begins to spiral out of control and the government assumes control of 50 cents out of every child-care dollar, liberals and progressives should argue that this proves the current free market in child care doesn't work, so the government should stop sitting on the sidelines and step in to fix everything.

(12) Ideally, the stepping in would consist of a complete government takeover of child care: a single-payer system in which the government does all the child care in the country, and nobody else is allowed to.

(13) Short of that, Washington should pass legislation forbidding providers to turn anyone away, and requiring all Americans to buy child-care coverage—whether they have children or not. This should be part of a massive child-care overhaul that will drive costs up even further and prove equally untenable. Then the country can go back and try Step 12—and we will all live happily ever after.

 

So, another blog post from 'reason.com' which, bitterly, is one of the least reasonable websites around. Even those sites with dudes dressed as pervy animals and all rubbin' on each other probably has more sound logic and thought out positions.