While we repeatedly hear how with Obamacare the young would be paying for the old because they rarely need to go to the doctor's, there is another way to think of this.
By buying health insurance, young people are helping to assure that they will live longer, healthier lives. When you are young -- the rest of your life -- the next 50 years, your entire adulthood -- is a very valuable thing.
We face for instance an epidemic of Type II diabetes and adult obesity. Should we not, at the same time that we are extending health care benefits to young adults, try then to address this issue more systematically by screening for pre-diabetes or the disease itself via an annual checkup? If your target was a million cases prevented, say, as a start, the value created from that economically would be immense.
We must stop thinking of going to the doctor as something you only do when you are sick. That's treating the symptoms. We must also engage in preventative medicine. That saves the patients money in the long run, and increases their health and well being. When things finally go wrong, that's when things get expensive ... and profitable. We take in a new car every six months for a check up. We can do that once a year for ourselves. We can run up $100K debts for an education, but we also want to be able to use that education to the fullest extent throughout our lives, and that requires a healthy body.
There is a lot we can now screen for. There is a service, for instance, from a company called 23andme. http://23andme.com. For $99 you get a kit, mail some of your saliva to them, they give you a report detailing your traits, medical susceptibilities along with your ancestry, going back 30,000 years. This tech is only getting better and cheaper. Why are we not using this now in our practice of medicine? Knowing our susceptibilities would save many billions and lead to happier productive lives.
So the next time someone says that the ACA / Obamacare has to have the young overpay so that the rest can be covered, remember how valuable a long happy productive life is, remember that the downside therefore of any medical issue in the young can be costly throughout a life.
One might also point out that if one were to require medical treatment but was young and uninsured, the cost for that treatment could be financially crippling, especially in a population that is un or underemployed, in mountains of school debt, and with little in the way of savings. Affordable health care protects people against this scenario - where they are bankrupted by a sudden medical expense. And here, our youth are most vulnerable.
We must in short protect our young people so that they can grow into healthy adults, for the good of everyone. It's about the young investing in themselves and we in them.