The Great Obamacare Intergenerational Swindle

In the sci-fi thriller The Hunger Games, a group of young people are made to compete against each other in a fight for survival. Post-Constitutional America is approaching that scenario—but the victims seem not to have realized it yet.

The intergenerational con game whereby Baby Boomers stick the Millennial Generation with trillions in debt through our gorging on entitlements is about to face its greatest challenge. Will we be able to talk healthy young Americans into buying medical insurance that costs seven times what it would in a free market in order to subsidize our increasingly expensive health care? Or will we have to sic IRS enforcers on them for selfishly taking advantage of the law’s pre-existing condition protections to get care at someone else’s expense in case of serious illness?

It’s a tough sell, but take heart, fellow Boomers. We’ve been preparing our children for community servitude for years. Why else did we feed them a steady diet of social consciousness, while preaching that it takes a village from the day we dumped them in daycare? Now, it’s time for them to pay up.

The math is crucial to maintain the pretense that Obamacare is economically sustainable. There’s no room for error. If the budget projections’ cross-subsidy assumptions are not borne out and Congress then reaches into taxpayers’ pockets to make up the difference, those Tea Party zealots might just tar and feather the Congressmen we’ve so worked hard to buy. Before you know it, oldsters without the means to hire concierge doctors or fly to India for specialty medical procedures will have to wait as long as Canadians for MRIs and hip replacements.

Millennials elected Obama twice on a platform of getting other people to pay their fair share. They buried themselves in college loan debt, believing us when we said that four years of partying their way to a liberal arts degree would open the doors to successful careers. But now, in the midst of the worst economy since Jimmy ‘Malaise’ Carter’s administration, they are struggling to find jobs—any jobs—while already paying top dollar to support bankrupt Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs, the benefits of which they will never receive.

Thankfully for us, the Community Organizer in Chief is leaving nothing to chance. Soon, thousands of government-paid Obamacare navigators will be teaching the new math that will make signing up look like a good deal. Organizing for Action, the leading edge of the president’s permanent campaign, is launching a media blitz designed to convince young people that Obamacare is cool.  Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is busily recruiting the NBA, the NFL, librarians, and scores of celebrities to spread the word, with mixed results.

The Obama administration has even set up a hotline to promote Obamacare—in over 150 languages.  And with the new data sharing procedures requiring personal information to be circulated between federal agencies, states, and insurers, it won’t be long before that data is used to assure universal compliance by tracking down shirkers. California is already giving out grants to school districts to train children to go home and shame their relatives into signing up. How long before they are also ratting them out?

If all this new media persuasion and Big Data mining doesn’t work, we can always fall back on our secret weapon. Slavery! Now, we can’t call it slavery, of course, but the more palatable Universal National Service, which will require every young person to donate a year of their lives to the community.

Think I’m exaggerating? Think again. A recent Aspen Institute “Summit” brought together leading Baby Boomers from academia, non-profit foundations, and corporations to lay out the master plan to replace the old Selective Service System that was made obsolete by the volunteer army. Every teenager will be expected to register and serve where bureaucrats determine the “need” to be greatest. In return, these young “volunteers” will get a modest stipend and credits to subsidize an overpriced education at colleges requiring proof of service for admission.

So don’t despair, Boomers. All we need to do is keep the great federal Ponzi scheme going long enough for the last Baby Boomer to slip into Alzheimer’s. That way we won’t have to care when Hunger Game participants start plotting the next American revolution.