Health Insurance will Become a Costly Expense for Young Adults

For young adults, many of whom do not have health insurance coverage, the health care reform bill will add a new and costly expense into their budgets.

The federal government is going to require that everybody buy a health insurance policy. For those who have insurance through their employers, the so-called individual mandate may have very little impact. But for young adults, many of whom are not currently covered, the health care bill will add a new and costly expense to their budgets.

The Census Bureau tells us there are 18 million people between the ages of 18 and 35 who are uninsured — roughly half of the uninsured population are younger people in that age group. Anyone who refuses to get coverage will be fined under the health care package. In the Senate bill, the fines start low at $95 a year in 2014, and they eventually rise to between $750 and $2,250, depending on the income of the person being fined. In the House bill, the fine is calculated as 2.5 percent of the income of the person being penalized.

If you charge people a fair price, then a 50-to-60-year-old should pay about six times as much as a 20-year-old but the Senate bill says older people can be charged only three times as much. So we’re going to penalize low-income young people in order to lower the premiums for older wealthier people. Young people are going to bear a disproportionate cost in this reform.

The Senate tries to make it easier on the young by offering them a bare-bones insurance plan that would be less expensive than all the others. This is perhaps the keystone for the entire reform effort, because if young healthy people don’t get into the insurance pool, everything else — especially cost containment — could fall apart.

Source: FoxNews.com

Can You be Forced to Buy Health Insurance?

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, (along with two co-authors from the Family Research Council and the American Civil Union) claimed the Constitution doesn’t give Congress the power to require Americans to purchase health insurance. They claimed the Senate cut a deal by allowing some states special dispensation from contributing to the Medicaid program. Their final claim was that the legislation gives the federal government the power to force states to do certain things.

While President Obama has defended a health insurance mandate by comparing it to the requirement to buy car insurance, conservatives point out they are not the same. State laws requiring car insurance are legal because states have far reaching powers to make law (to protect public health and safety for example), while the federal government’s authorities are more limited.

Conservative legal scholars argue that a mandate to purchase health insurance is not “interstate commerce,” because there is no economic action. They say it is merely an attempt to dictate personal behavior. While the Supreme Court has upheld laws under the commerce Clause that involve private citizens voluntarily choosing to engage in economic activity, this is “coercing” economic activity, they argue, not regulating it.

Liberal legal scholars counter that a health insurance mandate is most certainly constitutional. They argue that health insurance both affects, and is distributed through, interstate commerce. They also argue that health insurance is sold by national or regional insurance carriers — making the purchase of insurance policies, by definition, “interstate commerce.”

You can be pretty sure that, if there is a final health care bill sent to the president, there will be a flurry of lawsuits.