Obamacare Facts: It's Wrong For Millennials, but There is a Better Way

In the preceding weeks, Republicans have pushed against Obamacare and suggested an alternative. Public sentiment is on their side. Polls show Americans have an increasing aversion to Obamacare and are concerned about how it will affect them. Unfortunately, Obamacare is particularly harmful for members of the millennial generation.

Last week, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) put forward a sensible, innovative, and compassionate alternative to Obamacare. Titled “The American Health Care Reform Act” and accompanied by the twitter hashtag #ABetterWay, this proposal would solve the problems Obamacare created and ignored.

In May, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius wrote a blog on health care.gov, addressing the class of 2013. Sebelius writes that young people will be glad to know Obamacare ensures free birth control. Birth control is the least of millennials’ problems and to suggest otherwise is to belittle millennials. Birth control has been affordable and accessible long before Obamacare.

Sebelius giving free birth control to millennials is much like a salesman giving a customer’s child candy. Doing so simply appeases the child momentarily while the salesman sells the customer an overpriced, broken, doomed-to-fail car, or, in this case, skyrocketing health care costs.

Millennials don’t need free birth control and unaffordable care. They need jobs and a functional health care system. Obamacare is conducive to neither. In the past six years, millennial employment rates have dropped more drastically than those of any other age group. Obamacare is on track to worsen the situation.

Companies are lying off workers, cutting hours, and firing employees, because Obamacare crushes businesses by implementing oppressive mandates. If they did not have health care before Obamacare, millennials can thank the law for their newfound unemployment. Millennials need to remember that when unemployment rises, it hits them hardest.

Worse yet, health insurance companies are benefiting, their executives are receiving high government positions, and they are coordinating with the White House and nonprofits to spend your money to make you believe Obamacare is flawless. Without pricing mechanisms like a free market, and with government on their side, health insurance companies can and will charge you as much as they like.

Obamacare exempts the elite — congressmen, Capitol Hill staffers, and big business — from having to opt into the law. This raises a logical question: If Obamacare is so great, why are Democrats exempting their elite friends? Numerous Democrats who passed the bill have backtracked and admitted that Obamacare is a disaster. Others, like labor unions, are also outraged at how terribly the law has come to function.

The Republican Study Committee (RSC) recently released an Obamacare alternative. The American Health Care Reform Act would repeal Obamacare, thereby cutting billions in taxes and thousands of pages of impossible regulations. In stark contrast to Obamacare, this proposal is funded by tax deductions, not increases.

It embraces free markets as a way to lower costs. Americans could purchase insurance across state lines. Smaller groups could “pool together” to achieve the same “buying power as large corporations.” Other pools would ensure people with preexisting conditions receive good coverage.

The act would treat patients compassionately by expanding the definition of preventative medicine, preventing harms caused to patients by bureaucracy, and incentivizing healthy behavior. It would also make health care transparent by creating portals to provide information on various plans and providers.

The act would help stop “defensive medicine,” a widely condemned but commonplace practice used by doctors in which they perform extra and unnecessary tests on patients solely to avoid lawsuits. Its effects boil down to exponentially higher health care costs and distorted medical standards.

Finally, it would stop government from getting between you and your doctor by removing any possibility of health care rationing. It goes so far as to expressly state, “Nothing in this act shall be construed to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship or the practice of medicine.”

Obamacare is hurting jobs and health care, increasing cronyism, and millennials are suffering most. Conversely, RSC’s American Health Care Reform Act puts no unsustainable burdens on employers, meaning it won’t increase unemployment and hurt millennials. Lower costs means millennials can buy their own health care. The RSC’s plan is the opposite of a piece of candy and an overpriced, doomed-to-fail car.

Shoshana is Founder of Network Red and a contributor to PolicyMic. She was the youngest honoree of the DC GOP's 35 Under 35 list in 2012 and an honoree of the Red Alert Politics 30 Under 30 list in 2013. PolicyMic added her to their list of "10 Outstanding PolicyMic Pundits Making Waves Across the Media" in July 2013. She is experienced in growing political campaigns, campaign strategy, political communications, organizing volunteers, grassroots campaigning, editing writing, research, graphic design, and more. For the past five years, since the age of fourteen, she has worked in politics. She is a sophomore in America's capitol, with plans to graduate early. In her professional life, she is cheery, passionate, energetic, and always ready to work. Having been Republican from age eight, she is far from the average Republican.

I really do believe that this age group is far more interested in the latest ipad, iphone, or other electronic gadget, they’re too busy tweeting or exposing their entire life on facebook. If they wanted health insurance, they would have bought it. They still don’t want it, but now they’ll be forced to buy it. I honestly don’t think most of them understand that. Most of them also voted for Obama.

Since Andre` Carson is my rep, I sent him a simple letter. Wanted him to understand because being a representative in this district means that you have to be black and have the name of Carson. Here is my little note:

Dear Mr. Carson,

As a proud citizen of the great state of Indiana, I have a question for you and your staff.

I want you, your staff and all federal workers to have to purchase health insurance on the new Affordable Health Care exchange. I understand that the exchange opens October 1st. I, also, have heard that you and your staff may have an exemption.

Please advise me about your and your staff's health care insurance. I assume you and your staff are using what you voted for me to use? If it is good for me, it is apparently very good for you. Please advise.

Regards,

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