This health care article by Robert Samuelson is something every young person in America should read. They won’t of course; young people don’t pay serious attention to politics, and that is one of the reasons that American social policy is increasingly rigged against them. One of Samuelson’s key points is that the House bill
“mandates that health insurance premiums for older Americans be no more than twice the level of that for younger Americans. That’s much less than the actual health spending gap between young and old. Spending for those age 60 to 64 is four to five times greater than those 18 to 24. So, the young would overpay for insurance that—under the House bill—people must buy: Twenty-and thirty-somethings would subsidize premiums for fifty-and sixty-somethings. “
As Samuelson also points out, we don’t do car insurance this way. Young drivers, especially males, have more accidents than middle aged ones, so young drivers pay much, much more for car insurance. However, when it comes to health care, the plan is to intentionally overcharge young people to bring premiums down for their elders.
This health care scam would benefit me; I am one of those health-care guzzling geezers whose premiums would be shifted off to the gullible youth. However, I think it’s obscene. People in their twenties have enough trouble finding their footing in the job market and in a world that our educational system does little to prepare them for. Overwhelming, people in their twenties earn less than most older folk, don’t have the savings we canny old folks have stashed away, and face the high costs of finishing their educations and starting up new households. Increasingly, they are also staggering under the weight of huge student loans.
As it now stands, young people are about to get hit with a new, government-mandated requirement that they buy health care — at prices artificially increased in order to subsidized the premiums of mostly wealthier middle aged people. Sam the Official Intern at Team Mead is going to pay more on his insurance so that the CEO of this mighty enterprise can pay less. If this plan takes hold and spreads through the economy as its proponents hope, graduate students will be paying higher insurance premiums so that tenured professors pay less. Bank tellers will be paying higher premiums so that middle managers pay less.
This whole exhibition is particularly disgusting because if the Democrats in Congress are indebted to any group of voters, it is to the young. Record turnout by young people gave us this Democratic Congress and helped put Barack Obama in the White House by a convincing majority. Whatever happened to rewarding your friends?
As Samuelson notes, screwing the youth isn’t just about the health care bill:
“In fiscal 2008—the last “normal” year before the economic crisis—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (programs wholly or primarily dedicated to the elderly) totaled $1.3 trillion, 43 percent of federal spending and more than twice military spending. Because workers, not retirees, are the primary taxpayers, this spending involves huge transfers to the old” [italics added].
Yes, friends, 43% of the total federal budget involves transfer payments of money collected from working age taxpayers to the old.
Now there is nothing wrong with helping old people. “Honor thy father and thy mother” and all that. It’s the right thing to do.
But it’s increasingly clear that this country has its priorities seriously out of whack. Retirement was originally supposed to last just a couple of years — basically, the period of disability between working and death. Now the life expectancy has been pushed ahead almost twenty years, but people still retire in their sixties and expect a generation of “Golden Years”.
I don’t think that Americans should literally work until they drop, but there’s clearly a happy medium here somewhere that we are missing.
If these systems were sustainably funded for the long term, you could make a stronger argument for their fairness. Sure, you kids have to pay higher premiums now, but your time will come. Once you reach the stately and prestigious heights of middle age you, too, can enjoy relatively cheap health care premiums while laughing at the ignorant young serfs toiling to pay for it all. And you will still have twenty or thirty years of subsidized leisure to come as you cash in for all those Social Security and Medicare payments you made in the past.
The trouble is that this is a suckers’ bet. It’s almost certain that neither our retirement system nor our health care system will be as generous thirty years down the road as they are now. The costs are too staggeringly, mind-blowingly high. Today’s young people are most likely to pay very high taxes for these services during their working years only to watch them crumble as they themselves approach middle age and retirement.
Meanwhile, our educational system is turning out young people who don’t understand politics. They think standing on a corner asking passers by to sign Greenpeace petitions is effective action. (Ever wonder why almost everyone doing this is either very young or very strange?) The geezers smile indulgently; sometimes we even sign the petitions. But we know that real, grown-up politics is about organizations like the AARP who monitor every bill in the Congress to make sure there are some nice gifts for granny in it.
In today’s New York Times Ross Douthat writes that today’s younger generation is “in the balance.” Liberal ideas have the chance to capture this generation if the current round of Democratic government programs and stimulus spending are widely seen to work.
We will see; what happened to my generation was that as time went by we learned two things. First, we learned not to trust the government — and the Boomers who tended to start out on the left have migrated a bit toward the right over time. Second, we learned that you have to organize to get anything good out of Washington. So we’ve become much more skeptical about what government can do, and much more disciplined about making sure that it does for us.
But whatever the reasons and the justifications, America right now has a set of social policies and government programs that systematically discriminate against young adults — economically and politically one of the more vulnerable segments of the population. This is wrong and it is self defeating.
We need health care reform in this country. The bills working their way through Congress with all their flaws may end up being better than what we have now.
But eating the young is almost never good strategy. Either young people need to figure out how to get seats at the grown-up table when bills like this are being discussed, or older people have to start behaving more like honest trustees for society as a whole, and less like a hardened lobby looking out only for ourselves — and even then, in the short term.
PS: I see James Kirchick, a twenty-something who is already making a name for himself in the wonderful world of political commentary, is also concerned about the effects of health care reform and entitlements on young people. Check out his column in The New York Daily News.