Sometimes the folks at Business Insider get fairly simple ideas ass backwards. Take their Winners and Losers story on the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision. It’s dead wrong about Millennials (born after 1982):
Young people can also count themselves winners in the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, which allows children to stay on their parents' insurance plan until their 26th birthday. Read more: https://www.businessinsider.com/winners-losers-affordable-care-act-supreme-court-obamacare-ruling-2012-6?op=1#ixzz1zP2AiaCO
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Here’s why: the massive tax increase that the Supreme Court upheld hits Millennials almost exclusively. In fact, the tendency of young workers to skip health insurance and pocket the case is a major reason for the individual mandate. According to Forbes:
Obamacare forces insurers to charge their eldest beneficiaries no more than 3 times what they charge their youngest ones: a policy known as “community rating.” This, despite the fact that these older beneficiaries typically have six times the health expenditures that younger people face. The net effect of this “community rating” provision is the redistribution of insurance costs from the old to the young.
And up to now, young people have paid very little for insurance—without a court-sanctioned penalty tax:
The young are just entering the work force, and therefore typically have below-average incomes. In addition, the young are healthy, and have much less use for expensive health insurance.
The BI writer erroneously assumes that all parents will keep their 21-26 year olds on their plan. But many will not. Many don’t.
That means that Obama’s massive crap sandwich tax increase will land on the backs of Millennials, who are already drowning in college debt and debt-end, low paying jobs.
Even with slow economic improvement in the past two years, these so-called “Millennials” remain unemployed and underemployed at the highest rates of any group.
Yet these Millennials famously worked their butts off to get Obama elected. They still favor Obamacare. And irresponsible journalists like the one at Business Insider continue to tell them they won something in the Obamacare case. Washington Times writer, Patrice Hill, documents a young man with a Master’s in graphic design, four years out of grad school, working the photo counter at a drug store for $9 an hour. Now, he’s forced to add health insurance to his expenses.
Millennials won, alright. They won a crap sandwich from Uncle Obama.