The Obama administration and its lapdog media have been saying that three million previously uninsured adult “children” are now covered by their parents’ insurance. It’s not true, according to two separate analyses by health policy experts.
David Hogberg of the National Center for Public Policy Research and Avik Roy of the Manhattan Instituteeach looked at the data in different ways, and discovered that the administration had been using fishy numbers from the start.
Hogberg showed that the HHS numbers the administration used were part of a “back of the envelope” calculation, and not the kind of study on which we’d like to base budget decisions. Doing the same back of the envelope calculation using updated numbers (something the administration could have done, but didn’t), Hogberg found that at most 2.2 million young adults were now covered on their parents’ policies.
Roy did a deeper dive using Census data, and found that there had been no net change in the number of insured people between the ages of 19 and 25. That is, while anyone in that age group must now be covered on their parents’ insurance, just as many lost coverage through their employment as have gained it under Obamacare.
If we pretend that Obamacare had no other effect on the economy, the best you can say is that something less than a million young adults are on their parents’ plan who would otherwise not have been insured.
Roy also notes that there’s no such thing as a free lunch:
By the way, the ‘slacker mandate’ costs $160-480 for every other family
There’s another point to bring up. Obamacare’s under-26 mandate isn’t free. It’s a great deal for those families with “children” aged 18-25 who don’t have their own coverage elsewhere. But it’s a bad deal for pretty much everyone else with family coverage, because every family that doesn’t have children in that age range will pay higher premiums in order to subsidize the cost of adding these individuals to the insurance pool.
Once again, Obamacare drives up insurance prices for nothing.