Cohn’s First Anxiety about ObamaCare — the Not Enough Young will Sign Up

1 Not enough healthy people will sign up:

“Obamacare’s success depends heavily on the new health care exchanges, where anyone without employer-sponsored insurance can buy coverage, no matter what medical problems they have. But if the right kinds of people don’t sign up, the exchanges won’t function properly.

“Health insurance needs lots of healthy people to sign up for coverage. Their premiums cover the big bills for the relatively small number of sick people. So if the exchanges don’t enroll enough young, healthy people, insurers will have to raise everyone’s premiums. In the worst case, this could create what actuaries call a “death spiral”: Rising premiums prompt people to drop out, causing premiums to increase even more.

“To encourage participation, Obamacare offers generous income-based subsidies. If you don’t purchase insurance, you’ll be hit with a small financial penalty. Still, convincing healthy people to pay for insurance isn’t easy, even when it’s cheap. In the first year of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, in 1997, less than a million children signed up—a fraction of the eligible population. Since then, that number has increased to around eight million. But Obamacare is under far more pressure to prove itself early.

“Administration officials say they’ve developed a sophisticated strategy for persuading young consumers, partly by applying the data-analysis techniques developed during the presidential campaign. “If there’s one thing we know how to do,” says a senior administration official, “it’s reach young people.” They’re also conducting person-to-person outreach through social media, churches, unions, and other groups.”

Of course, Cohn, an ardent ObamaCare cheerleader, forgets to mention that the community rating provision, inserted by the Dems at the request of the AARP, adds a massive price increase on the young and healthy, see this graph.