http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304402104579151193673917488?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
The panic of the liberals is not unfounded. The young and healthy will not persevere through a balky ObamaCare website to buy overpriced insurance policies. Older and sicker shoppers have the biggest incentive to try 63 times (as one journalist did) to register. President Obama is right. For these customers, ObamaCare is a very good deal: hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in health care for as little as $0 a month in premiums after direct subsidies.
Voilà, the insurance death spiral.
Three lessons jump to mind. ObamaCare’s disastrous launch is not just a programmer’s bad hair day but deeply implicated in the central con of ObamaCare.
Secondly, ObamaCare did not need to be founded on misdirection and hidden taxes on the young. It actually would have been a better program and cheaper for the country if it hadn’t been.
Finally liberals hate to be told their hardball policy aim is to make more Americans dependent on government. But in a year or two thousands or millions of older, sicker ObamaCare customers may find their premiums soaring when the young and healthy didn’t show up to subsidize their care. Then what?
Bad hair day: One reason for the snafu-laden rollout is that the administration apparently delayed in setting key rules and specs so no discussion drafts would be floating around before the 2012 election. Why? Because the media would then inevitably dig into the question of who wins and loses under ObamaCare’s thicket of explicit and implicit subsidies.