Economist Moore: Young People Getting 'Shafted' by Obamacare

Young Americans "are the people who get really shafted under Obamacare," economist Stephen Moore tells Newsmax TV.

"The joke is on them," Moore, a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview. "And the amazing thing is that young people, in great percentages, voted for Obama over both John McCain and Mitt Romney.

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"And, yet, guess who are the victims of Obamacare?" Moore asks. "The very people who voted for him."

President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement is dependent upon young people buying health insurance — and, in some cases, spending hundreds of dollars every month for it.

If this doesn’t happen, the new insurance marketplaces — Obamacare’s backbone — will be filled with older, sicker people, and premiums will escalate. If that happens, the law will fail.

"If young people basically say: 'This isn't worth it. I'm not going to pay all of this extra cost for a health insurance plan that I don’t need,' you can get a much cheaper health plan in the private market," Moore tells Newsmax. "This is one of those areas where the wheels are coming off.

"You're going to have a massive lack of participation by young people. They're going to go without health insurance, and then you're not going to get the cross-subsidy for the people who have high demand and high cost for healthcare," he adds. "That’s where you get into a death spiral, and that's one of the reasons this thing, within two or three years, the whole jalopy is going to derail."

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Moore says that Obamacare continues to remain "on the defensive" — especially after the White House recently delayed the employer mandate until after the 2014 congressional elections — "and I really believe that either the bill will be entirely repealed sometime in the next two to three years.

"If it’s not entirely repealed, the wheels are just coming off on its own — and you'll see major, major reforms of Obamacare to, at least, make it not such a negative for the U.S. economy or for employers."

Obamacare, or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, seeks to provide coverage to nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance and lower skyrocketing costs.

But in the three years since Obama signed the healthcare law, the public remains highly skeptical — and political and economic realities have forced the president to gut his vision for universal health coverage for all Americans.

Here, however, is where Republicans can be most effective, Moore says.

"The big debate that comes in 2016, as we see the complete collapse of Obamacare by then, will be what do we do next on healthcare? It's clear that Obamacare is a disaster.

"You're going to get the left, people like Hillary Clinton, arguing for a single-payer system. Just move towards a totally government-run system. Or do we move towards a totally private-sector, competitive, patient-oriented healthcare system?" Moore asks.

"Here's where I fault Republicans. They have got to move beyond just attacking Obamacare and talk about what a healthcare system really would be like if we depended on free markets — and it would cost less, it would cover more people, and the quality of care would be much higher."