December 25, 2013
It’s hard to get news over at Fox on 15th Street, buried away in downtown Washington, five blocks from the White House. That presumably is why the Washington Post had a front page article discussing the extent to which young people are signing for the health care exchanges set up under Obamacare. The piece reports on the outreach effort to sign up:
“the healthy Americans in their 20s and 30s who are key to making the economics of the new health-care law work.”
In fact there is not a special need to sign up young healthy people as opposed to healthy people of all ages. Kaiser Family Foundation did an analysis last week showing that it would have relatively little impact on the cost of the program even if the number of young people enrolling fell far below their share of the population. While young people do have lower costs on average, they also pay lower premiums. While these are not completely offsetting the difference will have little impact on the costs of the program.
The conclusion of the Kaiser study is that the exchanges need healthy people of all ages. It doesn’t especially matter if they are young. (A healthy 55-year-old pays three times as much as a healthy 30-year-old.) The real concern is a skewing based on health status, not age.
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