March is a big month for President Obama. The Obamacare enrollment period closes on the 31st, and his administration is still 3 million short of its original enrollment goal. Needless to say, the President and his allies are scrambling to get those numbers up, particularly among healthy, young people. They even “hosted” a Youth Enrollment Day to try and convince the crucial 18-34-year-old demographic to sign up, though apparently nobody told them that Healthcare.gov was going to be down for maintenance.
The Obamacare exchanges only work if the young and healthy can be convinced to pay artificially high premiums in order to offset the costs of older and sicker people. But young people have sent a clear message – we do not want Obamacare. Not a single state, blue, red or otherwise, has reached the CBO’s target of 40 percent youth enrollment.
So why aren’t we signing up? Let’s ask Millennial icon Joe Biden, who recently made an appearance on The View. Whoopi Goldberg asked the Vice President point blank why young people aren’t signing up for Obamacare. Biden responded by saying that the Affordable Care Act costs about $300-400 a month and young people think it’s too expensive. You’re right, Mr. Vice President, we do think that’s too expensive, especially when the vast majority of us can find private options outside the exchanges for a fraction of the cost. And, by the way, when it comes to youth engagement, sending Joe Biden on The View may not be the best strategy.
According to this morning’s Millennial Jobs Report, 15.8 percent of 18-29 year olds are out of work. Somehow, though, the administration thinks that this generation that is struggling to find jobs should be able to afford a $300-400 monthly bill. Our generation is the future of our country; yet, somehow we’ve become the forgotten generation, the generation having to pay off the $17 trillion dollar federal government credit card.
In order to get young people back to work, we must scrap legislation like Obamacare that asks our generation to pay more, effectively kicking us in the teeth during our leanest, thinnest years. It’s unfair to force young people to pay into a system that will give us nothing but more debt and fewer opportunities. It’s time to end the government’s War on Youth and stand up for our generation. If we don’t, who will?
David Pasch is the Communications Director at Generation Opportunity.
