We may disagree about Obamacare in general, but we agree on one fact: Obamacare is a tax on youth and health

Whatever comes of the SCOTUS case coming up next week, we’ll always agree on that.

Couple law professors wrote in the Baltimore Sun the other day, arguing that Obamacare is, too, Constitutional. Here’s the best part:

The individual mandate is the centerpiece of a complex regulatory scheme that accomplishes two objectives: obligating insurers to cover individuals with preexisting conditions, and doing so without generating prohibitively costly premiums. Achieving these goals requires what insurers call risk pooling. Broad coverage at reasonable rates is only possible when premiums of individuals least likely to require medical care offset the expected cost of care for those most likely to require it. Risk pooling does not happen by itself. In an unregulated market, healthy people do what those with pre-existing conditions cannot: They either opt out of insurance, believing they will not need costly care, or voluntarily disclose their good health to insurers to secure a low premium. The result is that low-risk individuals pay low premiums and high-risk individuals pay high premiums, defeating risk pooling.

That’s exactly right. The individual mandate’s purpose is to spread the cost of insurance to people who don’t consume as much health care, thus lowering the cost for those who do.

I just made that point the other day. The individual mandate is a tax on the young and healthy.

These two law professors justify this Health and Youth Tax by arguing, essentially, that mandating coverage (like coverage of pre-existing conditions) without mandating participation results in greater scarcity of insurance. Insurers “pulled out” of states that tried, as they put it.

This is, by the way, exactly what conservatives have predicted.

To counter that effect, the writers argue, we have to emulate Massachusetts, where the government essentially captured the consumer base, requiring everyone to pay.

Here’s the thing: if your goal is to make insurance affordable for the elderly and sick, the individual mandate makes sense. After all, even a young, healthy person can find himself at the wrong end of G.I.normous hospital bills.

But the question before SCOTUS is not what will make “universal” coverage work. The question is: does the federal government have the authority to do it?

These two law professors say yes, because SCOTUS has set precedent with other rulings. Well, maybe they have. Or maybe not. I haven’t read any such rulings and might not understand them if I did, because the whole purpose of our legal system is to make the law so confusing, even to “experts,” that it becomes indecipherable to the average citizen.

For the purposes of this post, it doesn’t matter. What does matter — for the purposes of this post — is that Obamacare is just another front in the liberals’ ongoing War On The Young. It must be so. Two law professors writing in the Baltimore Sun said so.

(Posted by The TrogloPundit.)

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