Bear in mind that young people are supposed to be the financial bedrock of Obamacare — by participating and purchasing insurance on the exchange, they’ll help subsidize costs for older, more high-risk enrollees. Without the youngins’ money, the program theoretically could crumble.
Which is why the story of an already-insured law student enrolling in an Affordable Care Act exchange and finding that he qualifies for free health care is so richly ironic.
Brendan Mahoney, a 30-year-old third-year student at the University of Connecticut School of Law, logged on to http://www.accesshealthct.com Tuesday to see what coverage Connecticut’s state Obamacare exchange could offer. Mahoney had paid for a school-sponsored health care plan that cost him about $2,400 a year in 2011 and 2012, and he switched to a high-deductible, low-premium plan costing only about $39 a month this year. Could Obamacare beat even that?
Yes.
By filling out an online application, Mahoney learned that he qualified to receive Medicaid, the Hartford Courant reported. You know, Medicaid: the state-federal health care program that offers zero-cost premiums to at-risk and low-income populations. Instead of helping feed the Obamacare money pot to subsidize the health care costs of others, Mahoney — who is in the target age group that the Obama administration especially wants to see enrolling in the program — is capable of obtaining his insurance for free.
“So the great success story of ObamaCare’s first day is the transformation of a future lawyer who was already paying for insurance into a welfare case,” the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto wrote.
Individuals under age 26 can remain on their parents’ health care plan under Obamacare. The unemployment rate for individuals between the ages of 25 and 34 ticked up to 7.8 percent in August, when it was as ‘low’ as 7.2 percent in May. The percentage of individuals in the labor force as a share of the total working-age population is tumbling to levels not seen since the malaise of the 1970s. And Brendan Mahoney searched for insurance under an Obamacare exchange, and all he got was this lousy information saying he qualified for free health care.
As life under the law progresses, it will be interesting to observe just how many ‘young, healthy’ Americans willing to obtain insurance through Obamacare there actually are — and how many of them actually qualify as the law intends.
