Is the health insurance market headed for a “death spiral” of increasing premiums, fewer beneficiaries, and less competition under ObamaCare? A recent study from the National Center for Public Policy Research answers that question in the affirmative.
The study, by healthcare policy analyst David Hogberg, finds that the individual mandate’s carrots and sticks will probably be insufficient to induce large numbers of currently uninsured “young invincibles” — healthy, childless 18- to 34-year-olds — to buy coverage. Yet these people are the ones who must enter the market en masse if the healthcare law’s mandates on insurers are not to overwhelm them with older, more sickly — and therefore much more costly — beneficiaries.
