Who will pay higher premiums under Obamacare? Young men - May. 14, 2013
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
However - how many young men who are not insured by their employers, pick up medical insurance? I know I didn’t. I’d imagine this is just guys who've gotten married and had a kid AND who are on the upper end of the income bracket for the uninsured.
Maybe that comment works on reddit or other sites but I think many if not most of us here at HN work for ourselves or for startups who likely aren't able to provide across-the-board healthcare coverage for all employees. Given that the 20s and 30s are "the years to have kids", this group would include almost all budding entrepreneurs who want to get started in their 20s and have a family while doing so.
Under the ACA, essentially all of them will be required to.
Tax something and you'll get less of it. This most certainly includes "young" employment.
Irrelevant to the comment this was offered in response to, which discusses the individuals that will be required to get insurance, not the employers that will be required to provide it. Essentially all individuals will be obligated to purchase insurance (with a penalty/tax if they fail to do so); in some cases, employers will provide it (either by existing mandate, expanded mandate, or choice), but that's mostly beside the point.
> Tax something and you'll get less of it. This most certainly includes "young" employment.
Well, yes, that certainly is a fundamental problem with imposing special additional taxes on employment as opposed to other income as we do through payroll taxes which promotes (given equal efficiency before considering taxation) capital-heavy over labor-heavy methods of production and suppresses employment, but since PPACA doesn't contain special taxes on "young employment", I'm not sure how its germane to the immediate conversation.
The class who will see the biggest jump are probably not the young men who are insured and pay for insurance. But the young men who are uninsured and don't pay for insurance.
I'm ok with it, personally, because I have no right to my being just as no one does.
Seriously, I don't know your age, but are you at all confident that Social Security and Medicare will be there for you all the way to when you might die of natural causes? I seem to remember that surveys say the "young" don't believe it; if they're young enough, they don't expect to see anything coming from their FICA taxes.
What I expect is going to happen is that the retirement age will keep climbing, and I'll be chasing it up until I die. I also expect that income/wealth-based limits will be imposed which will cap whatever I can get well below the amount I'll need to come anywhere close to replacing what I can earn by continuing to work.
I'm disappointed by this, but I accept that it's necessary to keep the system running for the people who need it more than I expect to, and I'm grateful that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good income doing work that I enjoy for as long as I want to.
And this is not even completely true. From 1983 to 2009 the surplus in FICA taxes compared to expenses was just spent (there are filing cabinets with unmarketable IOUs from the government, what Al Gore's "lockbox" was all about); only in 2010 did the main Social Security fund start running a real deficit requiring money from the general fund.
I wonder about the retirement age climbing concept. Among other things, it's an even heavier burden on the young, e.g. your not retiring means 1 or 2 of them won't get a job in the first place. How long will they support a system that squeezes them so much? (There's lots more than this, of course, like non-recourse student loans.)
What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs? I said "1 or 2" since its quite common to replace more expensive older workers with a couple of young ones. Way too many programmers my age, a decade older, are finding it nearly impossible to stay employed in the field (another reason we don't care for the H-1B, L-1 etc. visa programs); I sincerely hope your optimism "that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good income doing work that I enjoy for as long as I want to." is well founded. I found it more and more difficult to find work starting sometime after age 35 until I got a clue and hid my age (easy since fortunate genetics makes me look decades younger than I am ... well, until I slip up and e.g. mention PDP-11s, which once got an "How old are you?!?!!" exclamation in an interview :-).
Blind optimism? I don't really have alternatives. I do think there will be a potential for self-employment as a consultant, using my years of experience (constantly kept up to date) to keep me more productive than a team a younger programmers. I'm also hoping that the biases against older programmers will fade away as I, and the overall population of software developers, gets older.
There are always alternate career paths too. My skills and experience cover the entire breadth and depth of developing software products, so I have a pretty wide range of jobs I can handle. That should help me stay employable too.
If you have the aptitude for consulting (I'm too much of an introvert to do that), yep, that's the classic thing to transition to. Other options are embedded and seriously classified work.
We're now going on two decades of bias against older programmers ... that hope may be misfounded (well, unless it's some young idiot that makes the first mistake that kills tens of thousands of people, the only thing that will substantially change our field in my opinion). It would be really nice if this changes, though. It would certainly be good for our field, then again, a counterpoint to the embedded recommendation is that device manufacturers have now trained us very well in the art of resetting borked devices....
Unless you were working at a near-poverty level income, Social Security has never been intended to come anywhere close to replacing what you could earn by continuing to work if you were physically able to do so. What it was intended to do, from the outset, is provide a minimum level of support to mitigate poverty in those who because of age or infirmity could no longer work. This isn't a result of changes, its all the system was ever built to do. There already are benefit limits in Social Security, and while "means testing" to reduce them further for people with other sources of income is often proposed, it doesn't seem to have much traction (beyond the existing, long-established practice of making SS benefits taxable income to those who have more than a certain amount of other income, which is a weak form of means testing.)
I'm 24, and Canadian, and I'm not banking on any sort of government assistance at all when I'm old, but everything is not about me.
For that matter, comparing it with the old model, the demand upon the youth start out much too early. In the US it looks like we might be reaching the tipping point where the young by and large can't afford to start families because the financial burdens placed upon them have grown too large.
Sorry to be harsh, but Canada is at an 1.7 fertility rate (2.1 is break even) and your society is therefore dying out, so your opinion in this area is not necessarily worth very much.
I think "welfare state" is a pretty loaded term, and I think America's economic troubles have almost nothing to do with health care. (Canada, for the record, has had public health care for a long time and our economic troubles are also completely unrelated.)
I actually wasn't necessarily including health care in "welfare state", old age pensions AKA Social Security here are the traditional start (it was Bismarck who set the age at 65, BTW), but of course health care is a big one that gets added later, e.g. for 65 and up in the US in the early-mid '60s. And those supports are a critical part of all this, they tend to destroy the old model, sundering family bonds. The young can say, with complete truth, they're already paying very heavily to support the old, starting when they can least afford it, the parents can say, with much less truth in the long term if the history of government promises are any guide, that the government will take care of them (and in a greater sense, including their money being worth something when they retire).
I also wasn't making a general case about our economic troubles and health care, just pointing out one existential place where the latter are contributing to what well might be the end of US society.
Anyway, the point is that we seem to disagree on who should pay for health care when, and how. That's okay :) Thanks for politely and intelligently sharing your thoughts with me.