Another Misleading NYT Article On Obamacare

The New York Times has another classic misleading article about Obamacare today. Basically, the gist of the article is that younger and healthier people are willing to pay the penalty for not having insurance rather than sign up for Obamacare. And it quotes Joseph J. Thorndike, the director of the tax history project at Tax Analysts, a nonprofit publisher of tax information, as saying, “The penalty for violating the individual mandate has not been very effective. If it were effective, we would have higher enrollment, and the population buying policies in the insurance exchange would be healthier and younger.”

As Dean Baker never tires of pointing out, this is just simply not true. When estimates on Obamacare first came out, no one had even considered that states would be allowed to opt out of Medicare expansion and that some would. But, even so, the number of people who are currently uninsured is well below the original estimates, meaning that more people have signed up than was originally anticipated.  In addition, far fewer employers have dropped their employer-sponsored coverage and converted their employees to Obamacare than was anticipated. This has contributed to the fact that the pool of Obamacare enrollees may be slightly less healthy than was predicted. It is certainly a much greater factor than the idea that not enough young people have signed up. As Baker notes, it is actually a greater benefit to the insurance company to have a healthy older person enrolled as their premiums are much higher. Finally, as the Times’ article notes, the full impact of the penalty has only gone into effect for 2017, so it is a bit premature to say that the penalty is not sufficient. But that won’t keep the Times from weaving a few miscellaneous anecdotes into a negative story.