Obamacare needs lots of young, healthy people to sign up – so they can be overcharged, to subsidize older people. Some commentators have hinted that this is problematic because young people tend to be uninformed about the law.

Jeffrey Anderson in the Weekly Standard points out that learning more about the law probably won’t lure the young, however. The numbers make it plain how badly Obamacare cheats young people:

"The findings are striking. Consider a 26-year-old (newly ineligible for Mom and Dad’s coverage) making $30,000 a year. Across these 50 counties, the average cost of the cheapest subsidized plan—the cheapest “bronze” plan—available to someone of that age from the Obama-care exchanges would be $2,134 a year. That’s roughly three times the cost of the cheapest plan this person could have bought pre-Obamacare, according to figures from the Government Accountability Office. Meanwhile, this 26-year-old’s taxpayer-funded subsidy, on average, would be $482, or just 23 percent of the premium. By contrast, a 61-year-old making that same $30,000 would, on average, get a subsidy of $4,018, covering 82 percent of the $4,885 premium for someone of that age.

"In the normal world of actuarially based insurance, a health plan would cost a 61-year-old about five times as much as a 26-year-old, reflecting the roughly fivefold difference in the expected price of their care. But in the peculiar redistributive world of Obamacare, that notion is turned on its head. Once the respective subsidies are factored in, the 61-year-old would pay, on average, $867 a year in premiums, while the 26-year-old would pay, on average, $1,652. That’s right—under Obamacare, the person who’s expected to cost the health care system only about one-fifth as much would, on average, have to pay about twice as much."