Ask the Obama administration why it is pushing legislation to conscript the young, and it will likely deny doing any such thing. But how else to describe individual mandates, the latest twist in the White House’s nationalized health care scheme?

It’s bad enough that the federal government is expanding its own power in telling citizens that they absolutely must pay for health insurance, like it or not. The most sinister element is that politically unpopular tax increases can be delayed or minimized by taking healthy young people and shoehorning them into a massive entitlement system. The youngest taxpayers would have to swallow their mandated insurance like bad medicine.