Sep 17 2009
Young adults - a key constituency in President Obama's election - are likely to be major beneficiaries of health reform, as well as major contributors to funding it, the
Washington Post reports. The benefit is that reform proposals would help make cheaper individual insurance policies available on the individual market to many young, would-be consumers who don't have access to such plans now. The cost is that a new mandate would force the ten million or more uninsured young adults who "bet on their good health" by going without insurance to pony up for plans.
"Depending on how Congress requires insurers to price their policies, this group could even wind up paying disproportionately hefty premiums -- effectively subsidizing coverage for their parents," the Post reports. Young adults can expect to face significant new expenses, Mark McClellan, a Brookings Institution scholar and former Bush administration official told the Post. "'It's important for people to know what they're getting into,'" he said. Still, about 52 percent of young adults support the new mandate, and 60 percent of under-30s support the Democrat proposed reforms (Murray, 9/16).
This is part of Kaiser Health News' Daily Reports - a summary of health policy coverage from more than 300 news organizations. The full summary of the day's news can be found here and you can sign up for e-mail subscriptions to the Daily Reports here. In addition, our staff of reporters and correspondents file original stories each day, which you can find on our home page.
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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