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POV: How Not To Fight Against Socialized Medicine
by Ayn Rand | 1963
50 Years Down the Road of Socialized Medicine
by Rituparna Basu | July 30, 2015
Is Obamacare Here to Stay?
by Don Watkins | August 11, 2014
What’s missing from the Obamacare debates
by Tom Bowden | March 11, 2014
Obamacare creates a new class of free riders
by Rituparna Basu | January 23, 2014
Obamacare Is Suffocating An Already Sick Health Insurance Patient
by Rituparna Basu | January 22, 2014
The Broken State of American Health Insurance Prior to the Affordable Care Act: A Market Rife with Government Distortion
by Rituparna Basu | January 21, 2014
Obamacare is Really, Really Bad for You, Especially If You're Young
by Rituparna Basu | August 21, 2013
How Obamacare Law Fleeces the Young
by Rituparna Basu | April 26, 2013
It’s time to unplug Medicare’s third rail
by Rituparna Basu | November 26, 2012
I’ll Buy My Own Contraception, Thanks
by Rituparna Basu | November 13, 2012
Will FDA choke off promising adult stem cell research?
by Keith Lockitch | August 10, 2012
How Important Is the Obamacare Litigation?
by Tom Bowden | August 12, 2011
The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Pre-existing Conditions (Part 3)
by Yaron Brook | April 06, 2011
The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved with Pre-existing Conditions (Part 2)
by Yaron Brook | March 10, 2011
The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved with Pre-existing Conditions
by Yaron Brook | February 10, 2011
The Avastin Travesty
by Tom Bowden | December 12, 2010
You Are Not Your Neighbor's Health Care Provider
by Yaron Brook | May 11, 2010
What About Private Health Emergencies?
by Tom Bowden | April 08, 2010
The Right Vision Of Health Care
by Yaron Brook | January 08, 2008
Be Healthy or Else!
by Yaron Brook | October 22, 2007
No Right to “Free” Health Care
by Onkar Ghate | June 11, 2007
Prescription Drug Benefits Violate the Rights of Drug Companies
by Onkar Ghate | July 24, 2002
Health Care Is Not a Right
by Leonard Peikoff | December 11, 1993
Medicine: The Death of a Profession
by Leonard Peikoff | 1989

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Obamacare creates a new class of free riders

by Rituparna Basu and Yaron Brook | January 23, 2014 | The Daily Caller

Welcome to Obamacare, land of skyrocketing premiums, cancelled insurance policies, and a website that is exhibit A of government incompetence. If Republicans are serious about stopping this destructive law, they must criticize more than its rollout troubles, which are fixable. They must expose the law’s fundamental problems, which its supporters are determined to hide.

For example, Obamacare creates a new class of free riders in America. This is the purpose of the individual mandate, the law’s central provision, which requires most Americans, starting this year, to carry health insurance coverage or else pay a fine to the government.

Obamacare creates a new class of free riders

Supporters portray the mandate’s function as the opposite. “We’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you,” said the president in 2009. “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,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Obama administration adviser, last year; “Insured Americans will have to pay more to hospitals and doctors to make up for your nonpayment.”

Now, not everyone without coverage has the intention to free ride — government distortion of insurance has priced people out of the market for decades. But even so, who are Obamacare supporters kidding with their feigned aversion to pawning off one’s medical expenses onto others? Free riding is the name of the game in American health care.

Why, for example, can someone walk into an ER expecting to free ride on the insured? Because federal law requires these facilities to treat him even if he has no intention of paying. Medicare (its mythical “trust fund” notwithstanding) and Medicaid similarly entitle more than 100 million seniors and lower-income Americans to free ride on younger generations and those of higher income. Employer-based coverage has also long been rigged by government so that older, less healthy workers free ride on younger, healthier employees, who are charged higher premiums to lower the costs of the former.

If Obamacare supporters were really offended by free riding, they’d call not for a law forcing people to buy coverage, but for the phasing out and eventual repeal of the government programs that allow it in the first place.

In reality, Obamacare’s proponents have no problem making one person’s medical bills the responsibility of another. Their real objection is that some people are not shouldering enough of others’ burdens, which is what the individual mandate actually enforces. Here’s how.

Recall a core goal of Obamacare: to make care cheaper for people with preexisting conditions. To achieve this, the law requires insurers to accept them and charge them the same premium they charge healthy people. But it’s a fact that someone who has diabetes, for example, has, on average, more than double the medical expenses of someone who doesn’t. Since insurers can’t charge higher-risk customers for their higher costs (the way auto insurers charge higher premiums to less safe drivers), insurers must pass on those costs to younger, healthier policyholders. Accordingly, 30-year-old nonsmoking men have, on average, seen their premiums more than double to pay for the various redistribution ploys in Obamacare.

How do you get people to buy a policy whose costs have been artificially raised? Enter the individual mandate. Its actual function is to coerce younger, healthier Americans into paying for other people’s health care. (This transfer is not, as Obamacare supporters say, inherent in insurance. If it were, we wouldn’t need Obamacare.)

If there were any doubt that this is the mandate’s purpose, the government’s recent actions have put that to rest. The penalty for not buying coverage in 2014 is the higher of $95 or 1 percent of your income, and for many the fine is negligible, compared to spending thousands of dollars on an Obamacare policy (the penalty increases in future years). Amid rising concerns that younger people won’t buy coverage this year, the government launched last summer a propaganda campaign to convince them to sign up. This media blitz, which enlisted sports teams and celebrities and even the mothers of these young people, was initiated because, if too few younger and healthier Americans choose to buy Obamacare’s overpriced policies, the law’s fundamental scheme will fail.

Obamacare’s individual mandate, far from ending free riding in America’s health care system, institutionalizes it on a national scale by force: the old and sick free ride on the young and healthy.

What does this say about Obamacare’s proponents, who continue to claim the opposite? That they think the American people can and must be fooled into accepting their policies. This fact alone should raise serious suspicion about Obamacare.

About The Authors

Rituparna Basu

Rituparna Basu was a researcher and analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute between 2011 and 2016.

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute