Key Features of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)

[AggregateDemand]

Keep the extension of dependent healthcare benefits to 26 years old. Maybe keep the individual mandate if they actually create affordable catastrophic care, rather than this comprehensive nonsense currently mandated is minimum care.

For the most part, nothing in ACA is worth keeping. The entire healthcare industry is based on tax abatement and subsidy. Either eliminate the income exemption completely, and reduce tax rates, or give a credit to all individuals, not just people who are lucky enough to get good healthcare through work.

[AggregateDemand]

It's funny how most of these economically-conscious conservatives who hate the ACA on what they call economically-conscious grounds only want to keep parts that are actually the most economically damaging. If you want to make the ACA truly, truly affordable you keep the individual mandate and the tax subsidies but get rid of the pre-existing conditions laws and the dependency extension to 26 years old. Not the other way around. Those are the ones that really drive up the cost of insurance in this bill, though they are morally correct.

It just shows how this entire outrage on the law is nothing more that political expediency and only wanting to keep what helps me.

The extension to 26 years old, makes young students more appealing in the labor market, which means we're actually hoping to produce far more than it costs to insure a healthy young person, especially if we are able to eliminate unsecured debt in the process.

Furthermore, demand subsidies have never reduced the cost of any mature product or service.

Let other people tell you how the world works. It's easier on everyone.

[AggregateDemand]

The extension only makes young students more appealing in the labor market in the presence of the laws on mandated health insurance coverage. Without the symbiotic relationship, it literally does not matter.

However, keeping the individual mandate while not extending dependency to 26 requires young people to purchase their own insurance. This would drive down the cost significantly more than having no individual mandate and the 26 rule, or having both. Because it is an individual mandate and not an employer mandate, it does not effect youth employ-ability.

Economics is much more robust than political policy, and the advantages of hiring workers who are already covered under spousal, parental, or senior health insurance should be obvious to everyone. The mandate only puts an exclamation point on existing norms in the labor market.

At this particular moment, it is not customary for companies to offer health insurance benefits to young unskilled workers, but that unfortunate reality is caused by the legislative destruction of the lower-middle class and the healthcare industry. If anything, my argument relies on idealistic market-based labor economics, not the existence of individual/business health insurance mandates.