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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (134296)	3/23/2010 3:53:15 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 542950

Sorry, had a senior moment this morning. Started replying to your other post as though I had not already expanded my comments on why the beneficial effect on cost of adding the healthy cohort diminishes over time. Had to leave and didn't have time to fix my post, hence the deletion. Won't new healthy young people come into the system as the first ones age? We're getting into territory beyond the back of the envelope here. Too many factors in play and too many of those factors have too many unknowns. Nonetheless, I can always muster a few comments. <g> "Come into the system." Not sure what you have in mind there. Under universal coverage, folks come into the system when they are born. Their folks have coverage and they get born into it. I assume that's not the point in time you had in mind. I suppose we'd have some immigrants coming into the system as adults but not at a pace large enough to be worth calculating. The more meaningful moment would be when they first buy their own individual policies, maybe at age 27, maybe before, assuming that they don't pay the penalty, instead, or use their own or a spouse's employer-paid policy, or Medicaid or Medicare. Yes, however big that cohort turned out to be, they would be mostly healthy and would be paying something in. But they'd have to cover the costs of both the formerly healthy cohort already in the system plus their contemporaries already unhealthy with what would once have been considered pre-existing condition. Sure, I would expect their contribution to the pot to be a net positive, likely to slow the diminution of the positive effect of the original new blood but not enough to achieve stasis. Too much baggage. But, like I said, too back of the envelope and too speculative to argue with any assertiveness. [An aside on "pre-existing conditions." I typed that term a number of times in the post I deleted. I notice that using the term now feels like using some archaic terminology, like I'm using "anon" every other sentence. Imagine. The whole concept has been rendered moot just like that.]