(10-03-2013 01:15 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  AAF: 30-year-old men face average premium hikes of 260%
A new study from the American Action Forum that looks at healthy 30-year-old men finds that underlying premiums for those individuals will increase by an average of 260 percent. The AAF study compared the least-expensive plans available today to the cheapest plans on the Obamacare exchanges, as did the Manhattan Institute study. The MI analysis, by contrast, adjusted those pre-ACA rates to take into account sicker individuals.

In a sense, the AAF study is more relevant to the problem at hand. Obamacare makes healthy people pay more for insurance in order to subsidize sicker people. It makes younger people pay more to subsidize older people. It makes men pay more to subsidize women. It makes everyone pay more to cover benefits, taxes, and fees that consumers might not ordinarily want.

Politically, this is absolutely predictable, because it has been clear for some time that virtually none of the public genuinely wants health INSURANCE, in the sense of actuarially-based risk-shifting. Rather, what the public claims to want -- especially (but not exclusively) people who expect to consume a lot of health care -- is health care that "someone else" pays for. Who that "someone else" is is unclear.