Paying for the health care of the irresponsible

Chicago Tribune columnist Dennis Byrne reports:

One thing last week's historic U.S. Supreme Courtoral arguments about Obamacare clarified: You healthy people will be paying more for juicers, addicts, gangbangers, smokers, fatsos, drunken drivers and other assorted careless, thoughtless creatures.

The central idea of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — the formal name of the Obamacare law — emphasized in the hearings is to spread the cost of health care to ever-larger pools of Americans. In particular, to those who pay low health insurance premiums, the young who choose to have no insurance and the healthy.

As Justice Samuel Alito pointed out, a typical healthy young adult annually may pay $854 for health care, but under the Obamacare mandate to buy insurance, he could end up paying $5,800 in premiums.

A politically incorrect article well worth your time.