Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel thinks we should bring young people into the system by hurting them more severely if they refuse.
This is a must (from their perspective) because the young must subsidize the old. It’s a classic pyramid scheme, and it will collapse if new players are not brought into the game.
This Obamacare architect isn’t backing down. The brother to Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to fix Obamacare because now, he wants us to believe, it is beyond repeal.
Of course, Emanuel pretends that the unenforced penalties are just an accident. But the Obamacare architect knows full well that they were a part of the plan all along. Making the penalties as severe as they would have needed to be in 2014 would have risked the rollout of the law. The Democrats lost the Senate because Obamacare was so unpopular. Imagine how much worse it would have been for them if millions of millennials had been fined for refusing to subsidize their grandparents.
The other “fixes” that Emanuel raised won’t fix anything. Subsidies cause prices to go up. Likewise, a “public option” will only become a monopoly for all but the rich. If companies are already dropping out of the exchanges, the public option won’t stop them. It will simply become the only option—which is what Emanuel wants.