I Sold Health Insurance - I Know Why Obamacare Will Fail

In all of the debate going on about Obamacare, few are talking about the REAL reason it will fail. It's simple math actually.

For over a decade I owned a company that sold health plans to people without insurance. Our target audience were the self-employed and the small business employee without healthcare. The 30,000,000 uninsured we hear all about.

We spoke to thousands a week and out of those, we would sell only a handful a day. 

Here is what we learned from those millions of uninsured that simply wouldn't buy from us no matter what we offered:

- people don't want to pay for anything - they want free health insurance
- people feel like it should be given to them and it is a right to have
- people have no urgency to buy
- young people (under 40 without a family) didn't care about being insured
- many young families could careless too because they would simply visit their local ER
- if they did buy, they wanted the best health plan on the market for about $1 a day...for the family
- people would pay their cell phone bills way before ever thinking about spending it on health insurance
- lots of people didn't seem to care that their family was at risk of financial ruin or lack of care without it

These are the very people Obamacare MUST HAVE to work and I will sit back and laugh while this fails miserably. Why?

See, for health insurance to work, it must be based on a pool of people - both healthy and unhealthy, young and old. The young healthy people pay premiums for care they never use. This revenue is then used to pay the claims turned in by the older, unhealthy policy holders.

Without them the entire system collapses and that is exactly what is about to happen here. 

They are foolish to think that young people are suddenly going to run to the exchanges, plunk down their credit cards and pay even as a little as $100 a month for any type of health care, when they have no fear of a small tax fine, are healthy and see no need for it, and assumed that it was going to be free anyway. Heck, I know people (some friends even) who are in the 40s who don't have health insurance and don't seem too worried about it.

Only some of those (and I do mean some) that qualify for government subsidies, that result in ALMOST FREE health care, will sign up. But again, why? Even a $50 a month plan is $50 that takes away from movie night, dinner or dates.

It simply isn't going to work people.

Think I am wrong? You just wait. Now the government will lie to us about how many people are signed up (and they already are) and they will merely bury the costs to us tax payers. But the reality is, we talked to these people everyday and I remember one specifically telling me back in 2009 - "I'm just gonna wait for my free Obamacare".

Yep, that's the nature of a majority of these uninsured.