Obama: Eat The Young!
Are you a non-elderly person who voted for Obama? Gee, thanks, from this Gary Johnson voter. And remember to thank yourself when your insurance skyrockets because you're paying for all the old people's health insurance to be not-too-much-more than yours.

Nick Gillespie writes at reason:

Over at Buzzfeed, Ben Smith notes one of the most obvious ways that Obama is tossing young people overboard. Come January 2014, their insurance premiums are going to go up. That's because part of health-care reform stipulates tighter limits on the spread of premiums between older and younger people. Current law holds that insurers on average can't charge insurance premiums for old people that are more than five times what they charge younger people. Under Obamacare, that allowable limit is being squeezed to 3-to-1, the result being that older folks will see dramatic drops in costs and younger people will experience major hikes.

courtesy Pew ResearchThat's just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to the big old-age entitlement plans and their effects on today's youngsters, there are two points to keep in mind. First off, Social Security and Medicare are massive in cost and they go to all seniors, regardless of demonstrated need. This, despite the fact that they are regularly defended as programs that are the only thing standing between old people and poverty. Yet as a group, households headed by someone over 65 years old are doing far better than households headed by someone under 35 years old.

Second, despite the rhetoric that surrounds Medicare and Social Security, these are not self-funding programs similar to retirement and insurance accounts; individuals don't own them and they can't borrow against them or will them to heirs. Instead, old-age entitlements represent a major transfer from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy. The payroll taxes that go into Medicare cover only about one-third of the costs; co-pays and some supplemental premiums bring that total up to around 50 percent of the program's costs. The rest comes out of general tax funds.

courtesy Mercatus CenterTheoretically, payroll taxes collected over the years are supposed to cover all costs related to Social Security, but in an age where the ratio of workers paying in to beneficiaries taking out is shrinking, those days are numbered (in fact, Social Security no longer can cover current benefits out of current taxes but is drawing down its trust funds). As important, the official government position - upheld by the Supreme Court - is that no citizen has a right to any Social Security benefits. So it's not a pension plan or even a forced savings plan. It's simply a way that the federal government gets money out of workers to give to retirees - even those who don't need it to make ends meet.

Here's another tough chew: Since 2010, the overwhelming majority of people retiring on Social Security will get less money in benefits than they paid in as payroll taxes (this calculation by Urban Institute analysts assumes 2 percent real returns on payroll taxes and 2 percent real increases in benefit values). In other words, the government is forcing most of us to pay into a system that skims 16.4 percent of every dollar of wages up to about $110,000 and will pay us a negative return.

A quote from Ben Smith's Buzzfeed piece:

And while one of ObamaCare's earliest provisions was a boon to the young, allowing them to stay on their parents' insurance through the age of 26, what follows may come as an unpleasant surprise to many of the president's supporters. The provisions required to make any kind of health insurance plan work -- not just ObamaCare, but really any plan of its sort -- require healthy young people to pay more in health insurance than they consume in services, while the elderly (saved by Sarah "Death Panels" Palin from any serious attempt to ration expensive and often futile end-of-life care) consume far more than they pay in. There is always a push and pull, however, and this year will be spent laying plans to shift the burden further toward the young.

State and federal officials and the health-care industry are currently preparing to implement two specific ObamaCare provisions taking effect on Jan. 1, 2014, acting on this politically perverse principle of shifting resources from your supporters to your opponents. The first is the individual mandate, which aims to force the young, childless, and healthy -- "Young Invincibles," as they are said to think of themselves -- to buy health insurance, even if they think (and even perhaps make a rational, if risky, bet) that they don't need it.

The second is a lesser-known policy to limit the practices of charging different premiums to different ages, known as age-rating. Many states currently set a limit on this difference, often mandating that an old person shouldn't pay a premium more than five times a younger person's, even if she's expected to use more than five times as much health care. The ObamaCare provision kicking in next Jan. 1 would reduce that ratio to three-to-one, essentially limiting what the elderly pay in part by forcing young people to carry a larger share of the total cost of national health care.