Obamacare saboteurs are convinced that if they keep young, healthy people out of the health insurance exchange system, they can bring the whole system down. They could certainly cripple it. Healthy people paying premiums is what will allow insurance companies to afford to cover all the sick people they've been refusing all these years, pre-Obamacare. Money coming in from people that little money has to then be spent on will keep the insurance companies participating. That's why
outside groups like FreedomWorks will be spending millions on an effort to convince young people that it's cooler to stay out of the system and pay a penalty, than to be insured.
Jonathon Cohn at The New Republic doesn't think it will work. He has six reasons, some more compelling than others, as to why. He argues that, while in the first year the penalty for not participating—$95/year—is less than the monthly premium. But the penalty will be increasing every year, eventually up to $695 a year for a single adult. Break that down and it's $58/month. On the other hand, the premium for a 25-year-old single person making $25,000/year (the median income now for 25-year-olds) will be about $42/month after the federal subsidy. That's not a hard calculation to make for most people, and the extra financial security afforded by knowing that a health crisis would be covered should be compelling enough to convince most.
A key argument of Obamacare foes is that the "young invincibles" just don't recognize the value of insurance, don't believe they need it, and won't buy it. That's what they're betting on with their campaign to appeal to them, but there's some evidence, as Cohn says, to suggest otherwise.
One survey, published on Wednesday, came from the online newsletter Morning Consult. The poll measured interest in buying health insurance through Obamacare’s exchanges and, conveniently, the pollsters broke down responses by age. In the survey, about 40 percent of young people said they were “about certain” or “very likely” to buy insurance, while another 40 percent said they were “about 50-50.” Only about a quarter of respondents said they were “not too likely” or “not likely at all” to get insurance.
The other poll, published in June, is from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Eighty-seven percent of young people surveyed said they considered it “personally important” to get insurance, 88 percent said “insurance is something I need,” and 66 percent said they worried about paying medical bills in case of injury or illness. [...]
Still, the best indicator of how young people feel about insurance may be the way they respond when they have full-time jobs and their employers offer coverage. According to Aaron Smith, president of the group Young Invincibles, around seven in ten young people opt for insurance, even though it means sacrificing some take-home pay. That's nearly the same take-up rate as older Americans have.
Polls aren't necessarily indicative of subsequent behavior: If they were the entire Congress would have been booted out last year, judging by their approval rating. But about
70 percent of young people who are offered insurance in their full time jobs take it, almost as many as older workers. Here's a group people who have experienced nothing but the financial insecurity of the Great Recession in their adult lives. Many of them will have huge student loan debts. They get just how precarious their financial lives are. Paying something like $50/month to add a little bit of security to their future won't be a difficult decision for them.
So it's all going to come down to outreach, and to making this group aware that they have the opportunity. That's going to be the hard part in red states where the state governments will do nothing to help get the word out, where some members of Congress are already saying they won't provide assistance to their constituents. The administration understands this, and is shaping its outreach plan in response. So they have to get the word out amidst all the shouting and misinformation from the right, they have to be louder and they have to be everywhere.