
Who will pay higher premiums under Obamacare? Young men - May. 14, 2013 - tocomment
http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/14/news/economy/obamacare-premiums/index.html?iid=s_mpm
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nmcfarl
This was inevitable. The group that pays the least, when it is folded into a
larger more varied group, will pay more. There was no way this was not going
to work this way.

However - how many young men who are _not insured by their employers_ , pick
up medical insurance? I know I didn’t. I’d imagine this is just guys who've
gotten married and had a kid AND who are on the upper end of the income
bracket for the uninsured.

~~~
dragonwriter
> However - how many young men who are not insured by their employers, pick up
> medical insurance?

Under the ACA, essentially all of them will be required to.

~~~
hga
Not quite. Many people are getting their work hours reduced to less than 30 a
week, a part time status exempts employers from Obamacare mandates. From "food
service" workers to higher education adjunct professors.

Tax something and you'll get less of it. This most certainly includes "young"
employment.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Not quite. Many people are getting their work hours reduced to less than 30
> a week, a part time status exempts employers from Obamacare mandates.

Irrelevant to the comment this was offered in response to, which discusses the
_individuals_ that will be required to get insurance, not the _employers_ that
will be required to provide it. Essentially all individuals will be obligated
to purchase insurance (with a penalty/tax if they fail to do so); in some
cases, employers will provide it (either by existing mandate, expanded
mandate, or choice), but that's mostly beside the point.

> Tax something and you'll get less of it. This most certainly includes
> "young" employment.

Well, yes, that certainly is a fundamental problem with imposing special
additional taxes on employment as opposed to other income as we do through
payroll taxes which promotes (given equal efficiency before considering
taxation) capital-heavy over labor-heavy methods of production and suppresses
employment, but since PPACA doesn't contain special taxes on "young
employment", I'm not sure how its germane to the immediate conversation.

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dclowd9901
Is this really news? It's pretty well known that young men have the lowest
health care costs of any demographic. In a system of distributed or shared
cost, the community who costs the least to maintain will inevitably pay more
for it.

I'm ok with it, personally, because I have no right to my being just as no one
does.

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napoleond
As others have said, this is inevitable. However, maybe the young men will
appreciate it when they become old men.

~~~
hga
Or maybe these young men realize that the Federal government's unfunded
liabilities exceeding 90 _trillion_ dollars, prior to adding Obamacare, will
not be redeemed, because they simply cannot be?

Seriously, I don't know your age, but are you at all confident that Social
Security and Medicare will be there for you all the way to when you might die
of natural causes? I seem to remember that surveys say the "young" don't
believe it; if they're young enough, they don't expect to see _anything_
coming from their FICA taxes.

~~~
DougWebb
I'm about to turn 43, and I don't expect to see anything coming from my FICA
taxes. I know that my FICA taxes are funding today's retirees, and not being
held for me until I retire, and that unless the working population starts
growing significantly larger soon, there won't be enough workers paying into
the system when I'm ready to retire.

What I expect is going to happen is that the retirement age will keep
climbing, and I'll be chasing it up until I die. I also expect that
income/wealth-based limits will be imposed which will cap whatever I can get
well below the amount I'll need to come anywhere close to replacing what I can
earn by continuing to work.

I'm disappointed by this, but I accept that it's necessary to keep the system
running for the people who need it more than I expect to, and I'm grateful
that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good income doing
work that I enjoy for as long as I want to.

~~~
hga
" _I know that my FICA taxes are funding today's retirees, and not being held
for me until I retire...._ "

And this is not even completely true. From 1983 to 2009 the surplus in FICA
taxes compared to expenses was just spent (there are filing cabinets with
unmarketable IOUs from the government, what Al Gore's "lockbox" was all
about); only in 2010 did the main Social Security fund start running a real
deficit requiring money from the general fund.

I wonder about the retirement age climbing concept. Among other things, it's
an even heavier burden on the young, e.g. your not retiring means 1 or 2 of
them won't get a job in the first place. How long will they support a system
that squeezes them so much? (There's lots more than this, of course, like non-
recourse student loans.)

What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs? I said "1
or 2" since its quite common to replace more expensive older workers with a
couple of young ones. Way too many programmers my age, a decade older, are
finding it nearly impossible to stay employed in the field (another reason we
don't care for the H-1B, L-1 etc. visa programs); I sincerely hope your
optimism "that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good
income doing work that I enjoy for as long as I want to." is well founded. I
found it more and more difficult to find work starting sometime after age 35
until I got a clue and hid my age (easy since fortunate genetics makes me look
decades younger than I am ... well, until I slip up and e.g. mention PDP-11s,
which once got an "How old _are_ you?!?!!" exclamation in an interview :-).

~~~
DougWebb
"What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs?"

Blind optimism? I don't really have alternatives. I do think there will be a
potential for self-employment as a consultant, using my years of experience
(constantly kept up to date) to keep me more productive than a team a younger
programmers. I'm also hoping that the biases against older programmers will
fade away as I, and the overall population of software developers, gets older.

There are always alternate career paths too. My skills and experience cover
the entire breadth and depth of developing software products, so I have a
pretty wide range of jobs I can handle. That should help me stay employable
too.

~~~
hga
If you have any talent or desire, you might want to add a bit of sysadmin
work, especially setting up systems (in my case, I start with building them
from "scratch", but I like that sort of thing). I.e. broaden your problem
solving scope. In small companies I also generally took over the duty of doing
backups, it's something I like to do and its importance cannot be overstated.

If you have the aptitude for consulting (I'm too much of an introvert to do
that), yep, that's the classic thing to transition to. Other options are
embedded and seriously classified work.

We're now going on two decades of bias against older programmers ... that hope
may be misfounded (well, unless it's some young idiot that makes the first
mistake that kills tens of thousands of people, the only thing that will
substantially change our field in my opinion). It would be really nice if this
changes, though. It would certainly be good for our field, then again, a
counterpoint to the embedded recommendation is that device manufacturers have
now trained us very well in the art of resetting borked devices....

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hga
An inevitable outcome of the switch to community rating:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_rating>

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bti
Ouch. I am in the process of starting my own business and plan to eventually
be doing it full time. I am currently 24 so I'm guessing once I turn 26 I will
need to buy my own insurance. Any freelancers/small-business owners have any
advice on this once the ACA goes into effect?

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antidaily
is 26 considered young? Can't you be covered under your parents until then?

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gpvos
It's called solidarity.

