United Liberty

Young adults may have been among President Obama’s most fervent supporters during the campaign, but they’re also among those most likely to get the shaft if his vision of health care reform comes to pass:

As health-care legislation advances through Congress, the young adults who were so vital to President Obama’s election are emerging as a significant beneficiary of his top domestic priority, but they are also likely to play a major role in funding any reform.

In a campaign-style rally Thursday at the University of Maryland at College Park, Obama will aim to tap his richest vein of support — voters younger than 30 — to help sell his reform plan to a more skeptical general public. “We’re at an important turning point in our push for real reform,” read the e-mailed invitation, “and it’s critical that we seize this moment.”

A 2008 study by the Urban Institute found that more than 10 million young adults ages 19 to 26 lack health insurance coverage. For many of those people, health-care reform would offer the promise of relatively inexpensive individual policies, which do not exist in many states today.

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Adding preventative care to a catastrophic policy makes the Finance Committee bill’s bare-bones coverage more appealing, McClellan noted. But for many young adults, health care will become a significant new expense. “It’s important for people to know what they’re getting into,” he said.

But it’s also essential that young, healthy people participate, said Linda J. Blumberg, a health-care expert at the Urban Institute, because the requirement that people have insurance “is really a mechanism for financing health-care reform.”

The more people steered into the system through such a mandate, Blumberg and others explained, the lower the total subsidies that the government must provide to keep insurance affordable. But if young people slip through the cracks — or if Congress, facing political pressure, provides generous exemptions from the mandate — then the government and people who buy coverage will face higher costs.

In other words, we’re going to require young people to get health insurance not so much because they need it, but because we need their money.

Here’s a thought — if someone doesn’t want to buy health insurance, what right does the state have to force them to buy it ? For that matter, what provision of the Constitution even conceivably authorized

Yea, I know I’m being quaint with all this talk of rights and the Constitution. I forgot what era we’re living in.