States that have mandated insurance coverage have watched their programs fail as younger and healthier people — usually making lower wages than their older co-workers — resist signing up for expensive health insurance coverage because they can’t afford the premiums needed to subsize the health needs of the aging baby boomers.

Barack Obama says he can avoid the problem by increasing taxes to make up for revenue that might not be obtained from youthful American workers — ages 19 to 34 — who’ll balk at huge premiums when they’re just starting to work, but whose money is needed to pay for the medical care of retired Baby Boomers.

Writes the AP about the health insurance cost increases facing Americans just starting their careers:

Health insurance protects people from the cost of an illness or accident by spreading the expense to all of a plan’s participants. If Obama’s model is to work, he will need to entice younger, healthier people to buy insurance so they will offset the expenses generated by those who are sicker.

At the state level, the guarantee mandate has often had the opposite effect.

“They’re very price sensitive. They’re healthy. They think they’re invincible and getting them to buy coverage is a challenge. If it’s expensive, they’ll walk away,” said Mary Lehnhard, a senior vice president at Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, a trade group.

The guarantee mandate faltered in states that did not do enough to get healthy, younger people to buy coverage, said Kenneth Thorpe, a health care analyst at Emory University.

“They didn’t put up new money,” Thorpe said. “So, basically, the people who joined were people who had trouble getting coverage and were therefore sick. What Obama is doing is getting a broader cross-section of people enrolled because he’s putting a lot of federal money into it.”

I like the idea of everyone having health insurance.

I just don’t know if there’s going to be an efficient way to do it that preserves our cutting edge medical advances since almost every government program — from immigration (an American citizen’s brother’s application for an immigrant visa filed in 1986 is just being processed today), to welfare (people are sometimes lined up outside of the trustee’s office before dawn on cold winter mornings freezing while waiting for the office to open), to Social Security Disability (many denials, needing to hire an attorney to appeal), to just getting a passport (one reporter waited 5 months for his passport card), requires people to wait, then wait some more.

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