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Numbers, numbers - Obamacare figures are good, bad and irrelevant; Bloomberg News; Beaver County Times; February 16, 2014.
Below is a critique of some excerpts from this editorial.
“… 55 percent of enrollees are women, who are generally more expensive to insure than men, mostly because of maternity care. … what matters now is how to persuade more young people, especially young men, to sign up for health insurance.”
[RWC] You may have missed what the editorial sidestepped in mentioning this problem. If you were paying attention, you may have asked yourself, “So what if ‘55% of enrollees are women’ and are more expensive (even excluding ‘maternity care’) to insure? Don’t the premiums take a group’s claim experiences into account?” In the real world, the answer is “yes.” That’s why men – especially young men – tend to pay higher auto insurance premiums than women. In the realm of government and politics, the answer is “no.” You see, despite women being “more expensive to insure than men,” Obamacare forces insurers to charge men and women of the same age the same premium for the same policy. In other words, Obamacare forces men to subsidize healthcare insurance for women. Where are all the feminists screaming “we don’t need men to pay for our medical care?”
Finally, when someone reports “better” enrollment figures, don’t fall for the idea people are signing up for Obamacare because they are warming to it. Remember, people know if they don’t have a medical-care insurance beginning this year, they are in violation of the law, must pay a fine, and the IRS is the enforcer.
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