| HN Mirror

I'm not clear on to what extent the mandatory coverage requires young people to pay more than the expected cost of their cohort, or if it simply requires them to carry their own expected cost so that the older insured people (or, perhaps, simply the taxpaying citizenry) don't have to pay health care costs of the younger uninsured generation.

The author of the article also says, "Young people are typically healthy. On average, they incur very low medical costs each year. In any social insurance system, most of them will end up paying in more than they get out during their early years"

It's not just the early years, it's all years. The way insurance works is that most people pay in more than they ever get out. You're insured so that in the unhappy event that you end up with a huge, abnormal, way above average expense, insurance will cover it. This is possible because, on average, most people pay in more than they ever get out. This fact in itself is not anything specific to insuring the youngest and healthiest people. The value of insurance is not measured by how much you "get out". It's measured by how much coverage you had, regardless of whether you used it.

I hope to never use my health insurance, or to use it (i.e., "get out of it") as little as possible. So far I've done great at that. Does not "getting out" what I've paid make me think I've been paying without getting value? Hardly. And my belief in that value is not conditioned on my expecting to get payments out of it in the future, any more than my belief in the value of my auto insurance is. I hope also to never get any money out of my auto insurance policy, this year or in any future years, yet it will still be worth every penny I pay.