Always looking for ways to get young people engaged in progressive politics, my colleagues over at Campus Progress Action teamed up with the Young Invincibles project to produce this ad touting how health reform would cover young Americans:
This strikes me as a fairly clever effort to remind people that the law does a lot of good for younger people. Under the current system, some 30% of young people are uninsured because, as a group, they have higher rates of unemployment, earn less than older Americans, or feel like they don’t need insurance. The healthy among them may be sucked into cheaper subprime coverage on the individual market — that’s a desirable group from the insurers’ perspectives — but that coverage will not work if they become sick and need actual care.
Under reform, not only are young people going to benefit from the early provisions in the Patients’ Bill of Rights (as the video points out), but they’ll also have coverage options in the exchanges and could even enroll in a more affordable (but less comprehensive) young invincibles insurance plan. Interestingly, that last option was included at the behest of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) but all of these early provisions — like much of the health care law — have a lot of bipartisan support, despite the GOP’s repeal rhetoric. Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle even proposed legislation that “would have gone a step further than the Democrats’ new health care law by requiring the coverage of adult children up to age 30.”
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