Barack Obama recently shot a video in which he encouraged young people to sign up for the health-insurance program named after him.
“You can do it right now,” Obama says in the video. “And most folks can find coverage for $50 to $100 per month. That’s probably less than your cellphone bill.”
All I can say is, these kids today must have some pretty expensive cellphone bills.
The video directs viewers to go to the healthcare.gov website to see what sort of health-insurance subsidies they would get at different income levels. I went to it and ran the numbers for a young family with three kids living in New Jersey.
I plugged in an annual household income of $80,000. At that income level, the family might be having a tough time just getting by in a state with one of the highest cost-of-living indexes in the country.
But when I ran the numbers I found that the cost of a typical “bronze” plan – the least expensive under the Affordable Care Act - would be $7,400 a year. That’s a big chunk of their paychecks.
The good news is that they get a subsidy from the federal government to help pay that bill. The bad news? That subsidy is a mere $42 a month.
The subsidy’s even smaller for a single person making $37,000 a year. It’s zero.
What if they can’t afford the premiums? The state Legislature took action this year to address that problem:
They’re going to charge them thousands of dollars in penalties for not having insurance.
That hardly seems fair. At least it didn’t to one prominent politician back in 2008 when Hillary Clinton was promoting a federal “individual mandate” to purchase health insurance as part of her campaign for the Democratic nomination for president.
"Here's the concern. If you haven't made it affordable, how are you going to enforce a mandate? If mandates were the solution, we could try that to solve homelessness, by mandating that everybody buy a house,” said her opponent. “The reason they don't have a house is they don't have the money."
That guy was Barack Obama. He argued that no mandates would be needed under the plan he’d adopt.
“I am confident that if people have a chance to buy high- quality health care that is affordable, they will do so,” he said in that debate. “And that's what our plan does and nobody disputes that.”
New Jersey’s Democrats do. After the Obamacare mandate was repealed by the Congressional Republicans, the New Jersey Democrats voted to impose a state mandate to replace it.
If you didn’t buy insurance by Saturday, come April 15 the state is going to hit you with a penalty equal to the average annual premium of a bronze plan. That’s thousands of dollars.
I called the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Joe Vitale, and asked him about that.
Vitale said that rates have dropped 9 percent for next year thanks to the mandate and a reinsurance program his fellow Democrats enacted.
That’s nice, but what about the stingy subsidies for residents of high-cost New Jersey?
“The subsidies for families and individuals who earn at the higher end of system should be greater, but that’s not something we control,” Vitale said. “I know the mandate is not popular but everyone has to be in it for it to work for everyone else.”
But the feds should have done more to compensate for those living in high-cost states, he said.
“When they designed the rate they have a bunch of doctors sitting around,” he said. “They don’t get it. New Jersey, New York and Connecticut get screwed. It’s not fair.”
No, it’s not. And those that get screwed the worse are the young people. Vitale said the system is set up so that they pay more for their care then it actually costs. That means older people can be charged less for their care than it actually costs.
“If there weren’t young people in the individual market it would collapse of its own weight,” he said.
That’s where he and I disagree. If you have to force people to be in the market, then you should change your system so force is no longer needed.
That’s what I believe. And it’s what Obama once believed.
As a great man once said, if you haven't made it affordable, how are you going to enforce a mandate?
Come April, we will find out.
ADD: Here’s a link to the Obama video. There is no source given for the assertion that “most” - i.e. more than half - of young people can get coverage for less than $100 a month. But when you run the numbers on the health-care site, you will see that you have to be making less than $20,000 a year to get that sort of a subsidy. Meanwhile young people making more than about $36,000 get no subsidy at all and have to pay full price for their plans. Many are also paying back huge student loans so they already may be underwater on their bills.
NOTE: The April 15 reference above is to tax day in general. As of this coming April 15 the Obamacare penalty will still be in effect for filers. The New Jersey mandate takes effect Jan. 1 and will be collected April 15 of the following year.
Paul Mulshine may be reached at pmulshine@starledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @Mulshine. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.