Despite Obama's promise of a socialist utopia whereby all of his snowflake, millennial supporters would jump at the opportunity to 'spread their wealth around' for the greater good, his one crowning achievement that attempted to implement that vision, Obamacare, has proven to be a complete failure. As it turns out, while millennials may be naive, they're not stupid.
While it may not have been readily apparent to the young Obama voters in 2008, most of whom would have blindly approved of almost any policy he put forward good or bad, Obamacare was always just a gigantic tax, via both off-market premiums and actual taxes (or 'penalties' according to the Supreme Court), levied on young people to cover the expenses of older people.
And perhaps nothing illustrates the cause of Obamacare's epic failure than the following chart from the Washington Post which highlights the fact that the top 1% of health-care spenders use more resources, collectively, than the bottom 75% combined. Slice the data a different way, and the bottom half of spenders all together rack up only about 3% of overall health care spending — a pattern that hasn’t budged for decades.
In other words, the youngest people of this country are paying $1,000s of dollars each year for health insurance that they almost never use...and haven't for decades.
As Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute points out, Obamacare solves precisely the wrong problem by taxing young people to provide subsidies to older folks who will then just consume even more healthcare and drive already astronomical healthcare prices even higher.
But Tom Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, disagreed. He said that the study is based on quick and incomplete snapshots of health and argued that it is yet another way to divert from the health-care discussion we should be having: about how to rein in spending. Using this data to argue about where to get premium dollars from — from the pockets of the well or the sick — simply allows the system to grow ever bigger and prop up an even-more-expensive medical system.
“We all get diverted by hoping we can hide the bill under someone else’s pillow,” Miller said. “I think that’s the political argument you hear — these low spenders, we’re scared to death they might catch on to the fact they’re getting taken to the cleaners” by being forced to buy expensive health insurance they don’t need.
But, seemingly no amount of logic will ever convince idealists, like Marc Berk of Health Affairs, that young people somehow have an inherent obligation to "take care of people who are very sick."
“The key takeaway message really is most people are in good health; they don’t spend a lot of money, and yet it’s important to have them be part of our insurance system. If they’re left out of the system, we’re not going to have the funds to take care of people who are very sick,” said Marc Berk, a health policy researcher and contributing editor of Health Affairs who led the analysis.
And while millennials may shout their verbal support at liberal rallies, they're apparently much less willing to demonstrate their actual support with their wallets.