CBS Argues Young People Need to Enroll in ObamaCare
Millions of young “invincible” Americans should buy insurance that they probably will not use very much in order to keep ObamaCare afloat, according to Aug. 15 CBS “Evening News.”
The one-sided report promoted ObamaCare, by talking to only a young man who intends to sign up with a government exchange and a woman from a group supportive of the law.
CBS made it sound like buying insurance in your twenties for a couple hundred dollars a month is easy, but failed to point out an economic factor that could make this difficult: high youth unemployment in the U.S. According to the May 3, 2013, New York Times, “Over the last 12 years, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest.”
Ben Tracy interviewed Takima Butler from the Young Invincibles, a group not only supportive of Obamacare, but that has received more than $11 million from liberal billionaire George Soros. The funding was not mentioned in the report.
Butler argued that ObamaCare’s exchanges will only work if young people sign up saying, “When young people are insured, it's going to bring down the cost for everybody because we're relatively healthy. In order to make this law successful, we really need to get everyone insured.” Young Invincibles is part of the liberal Center for Community Change, which has received $11,050,000 from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2000.
According to Investor’s Business Daily and The National Center for Public Policy Research, most single young people are financially better off not buying ObamaCare and paying the $95 fine instead. However, without these young people paying into the system, “the exchanges will enter a "death spiral" where only the older and sicker participate and price of insurance premiums will increase precipitously.”
“The government's goal is to enroll 7 million Americans in the exchanges by next spring. For the system to work, about 2.7 million of them need to be young adults between the ages 18 and 35,” according to Tracy. Currently, there are an estimated 19 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 who are uninsured.
To support their argument, CBS interviewed 26-year-old Jordan Zavaleta who plans to buy the new health insurance, and didn’t seem fazed by the “less than $200 a month” price tag. “I just paid off my student loans and that was $200 a month. Now that will be my health insurance.”
Not only did Tracy’s report overlooked the high unemployment rate among this demographic, it ignored worries that businesses are cutting back hours because of ObamaCare. In fact, none of the problems created by the legislation were mentioned, nor was it’s unpopularity. A NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from June of this year showed that 49 percent of Americans believed that Obama’s Affordable Care Act was a bad idea.
