ObamaCare apologists to young, healthy Americans: Do your duty and buy health insurance

Remember when the Democrats had to pass ObamaCare because, they assured us, everyone was demanding access to health insurance?

About that, it turns out one of Obama's most loyal voting blocs - healthy young people - still has enough economic sense to recognize that health insurance is a bad value for them. So now that Democrats have engineered the clunky, dishonest takeover of health care that has been their dream for generations - now that they've made it easy for young people to glom onto the insurance Democrats have made easily available by twisting into a pretzel all economic logic - young people are just not that into it. That's a problem, because in order for ObamaCare to work - well, ObamaCare can't work, but in the theoretical fantasyland in which it works - it needs young people's money. Badly. Older people who get sick a lot drain the system of resources, and when everyone is herded into a system, those who don't avail themselves of the benefits are absolutely essential. If they actually figure out it's not in their best interests to sign up, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. So Ezekiel Emanuel, one of ObamaCare's biggest apologists, has written a piece in today's Wall Street Journal that essentially admits what some of us figured out long ago: ObamaCare will be a tough sell to young people, and the government will have to engage in some aggressive marketing to get them to sign up:

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Insurance companies are spooked by this possibility, so they are already raising premiums to protect themselves from potential losses. Yet this step can help create the very problem that they are trying to avoid. If premiums are high—or even just perceived to be high—young people will be more likely to avoid buying insurance, which could start the negative, downward spiral of exchanges full of the sick and elderly with not enough healthy people paying premiums. Fortunately, there are solutions. First, young people believe in President Obama. They overwhelmingly voted for him. He won by a 23% margin among voters 18-29—just the people who need to enroll. The president connects with young people, too, so he needs to use that bond and get out there to convince them to sign up for health insurance to help this central part of his legacy. Every commencement address by an administration official should encourage young graduates to get health insurance. Second, we need to make clear as a society that buying insurance is part of individual responsibility. If you don't have insurance and you need to go to the emergency room or unexpectedly get diagnosed with cancer, you are free- riding on others. Insured Americans will have to pay more to hospitals and doctors to make up for your nonpayment. The social norm of individual responsibility must be equated with purchasing health insurance.

Welcome to big government health insurance, and the stark differences between what they tell you when they're trying to pass it and what they tell you when they're struggling to implement it. Then, it was all about the wonderful benefits you would receive. To be sure, the electorate didn't buy it even then, but they shoved it down our throats anyway. But that was then. Now, it's your "social responsibility." You have to buy health insurance! We're trying to run a system here, and you've got a lot of nerve noticing that you'll almost certainly spend more on ObamaCare-blessed insurance than you would if you just paid out of pocket when you need something. So the answer proposed by Emanuel and others is to market the hell out of it to young voters. He cites as a model the efforts made in Massachusetts to sell MassCare by advertising at Red Sox games and in other venues where you can get the attention of young people. I guess the good news is that young people still like baseball. But let's be clear about what they're really admitting here: The public at large was never demanding what ObamaCare delivers. In order to make the system even comport to their delusional theories, they have to arm-twist people to get in. Emanuel is pretty sure young people will comply because, he says, they love Obama! One of the reasons they love him is that they're at a place in their lives where they want things handed to them, and that's what he offers. They want unlimited rights and no responsibilities. Let's see how they react when they discover that Obama does indeed demand something from them, and they really don't get equivalent value in return. That sounds like a quick way to turn these young people into reality-grasping adults, which usually means they turn into Republicans.