December 18, 2013
If you didn’t hear about a new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation making this point, then you should be upset about a news outlet near you. There have been numerous reports about the need to get young healthy people into the insurance pools in order to keep costs down. The argument was that if too few young people signed up for insurance, then costs would rise. Insurers would then be forced to raise their premiums to maintain profit margins. This would then lead more people to opt out of buying insurance, which then lead to further premium hikes. Eventually only very sick people would end up in the pools and would have to pay very high prices for insurance.
The Kaiser report shows that even if young people sign up at just 50 percent of the rate of the population as a whole, it would only raise costs by 2.4 percent. This is not enough to lead to the sort of death spiral that has been hyped in the media. The report concludes that Obamacare has much more to fear from a skewing of enrollees by health condition than by age, as has been frequently noted here in the friendly confines of Beat the Press.
Anyhow, given the hype that the death spiral stories have received, we should be reading about this new Kaiser report everywhere. Huffington Post picked up a Reuters report on the topic. Michelle Singletary, the WaPo’s personal finance columnist, was also on top of the issue. Let’s see how long it takes the rest to follow.
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