I’ve avoided saying anything on this blog about the health care debate, not because I don’t have an opinion, but because it seemed to vary on a daily basis about which way the debate was going, and anything I said would be obsolete very quickly unless I updated the blog each day as well (which I don’t have the requisite commitment to blogging to do).  This is likely to be my sole comment on it, and it is to serve as a warning to certain people in politics.

If you pass a health care reform bill that mandates all adult Americans to purchase insurance policies without providing a Medicare-like public option, beware.  Beware the sleeping giant.

I speak of Generation Y, the group of people born in the 1980s.  This is my generation.  It is the generation that, arguably, delivered Barack Obama the White House.  It is also the generation with the most people who are “voluntarily uninsured.”  (The “young invincibles,” as the sneering corporate media dubs us, a phrase that is extremely offensive to those of us in our 20s who do have serious pre-existing conditions, such as yours truly, and already have accepted that our bodies are on a time limit because we get proof of it at every doctor’s visit.)

Yes, of the voluntarily uninsured, a majority of them are young people who (for whatever reason) don’t think they need health insurance yet.  This is true.  This means that my generation has become a convenient scapegoat for those forces who think that the problem is that things cost too much for the insurance industry.  We (I say “we” to refer to Generation Y as a whole, since I am obviously not part of the “we” who can voluntarily forgo health insurance) are blamed for the rise in premiums, since we aren’t there to share the costs with everyone else.  The fact that the health insurance industry has raked in record profits lately seems to have escaped the minds of these people, but there you have it.  A mandate from the government to buy insurance would hit my generation the hardest.

And let me tell you, the Democratic Party will not like the result.  In all the calculations by the White House and the Blue Dog members (not least of which appear to be calculations about how much money they will lose from the industry in donations if they support real reform), the effect of waking up the sleeping giant of Generation Y and its successor, the Millennials, seems to have been lost.

My generation put these Democrats and this President into power.  I have to admit that I was never on board with hope and change; I was always skeptical and cynical about that rhetoric.  But many of my generation actually did believe it.  More importantly, they believed in it. They saw candidate Obama as a person who was in touch with them and could actually represent them. I can say with near certainty that forcing this generation to send their money to the bloodsucking private insurance industry, in exchange for junk policies (which is all that will be offered at the rates that Generation Y can actually afford—keep reading), will drive these new voters into cynical apathy or possibly even into the arms of the Republican Party.

The AFL-CIO recently completed a report on the economic state of young workers.  Their findings were that my generation (and to an extent, Generation X) can barely afford their bills, if at all; that a third of us still live with parents because of necessity; that if we lost our sources of income, a huge majority of us would have no more than a month’s worth of living expenses saved up; and that we have the worst health benefits, sick/vacation packages, and retirement benefits of any age group.

THIS is the generation that the Democrats in Congress and apparently, the President, would force to enrich the health insurance industry.  Generation Y cannot afford it. However much CNN and its ilk may want to pretend that my age cohort has a large number of uninsured because we would rather pay out for iPods, the truth is that we don’t have it because a great many of us have crappy jobs (if any) with crappy wages and worse, no benefits.  I am exceedingly grateful to be in the portion of my generation that does have at least mediocre health insurance that covers my pre-existing conditions and a deductible that wouldn’t require me to tap into the cash line of my credit card to pay.

If we get a mandates-only health insurance bill out of Washington, where is the money going to come from to pay for the premiums, I ask?  Government subsidies?  Try getting government subsidies as a young person unless you are a single parent or living in a box.  I’ve tried.  The proposed subsidy program in one of the many health care bills, the one that does not have a public option, is about at this level.

Will it be like in Massachusetts, where you must provide proof of insurance to the state tax commission come tax day, and if you cannot provide it for all 12 months, you get a fine automatically taken out of your rebate?  That’ll go over well.  What if such a law would mean that a tax rebate became a tax liability, a liability that one could not pay?  Are we going to put people in jail for failure to send money to a private industry?  The Republican town hall disruptors scream about “fascism,” but if that’s not actual fascism, I don’t know what is.  If this is what we end up getting, you can toss me a tea bag and count me as one of them.  I strongly suspect I will not be the only liberal-turned-”teabagger” if this is what passes.

Incidentally, the cost of insurance premiums in Massachusetts has shot through the roof since “Romneycare” was enacted.  So much for mandates alone being an effective way to lower costs.

If the Democrats pass Romneycare-turned-national, they will lose Generation Y and the Millennials.

Obama’s going to make a statement on Wednesday about his vision for health care reform.  About time.  I hope he’s taken to heart the lesson that there are few real leaders in Washington, DC, and that Congress is used to 8 years of being threatened and intimidated by a consummate bully of a President to the extent that they have apparently forgotten how to lead.

A mandates-only bill is what I am against.  What I am for is a little harder to articulate.

I am in favor of a public health care option that is administered like Medicare—something that every American would be eligible for but that was not mandated and did not have automatic enrollment.

Call be a libertarian, but I am not in favor of “universal coverage” in the sense that 100% of the population would have “insurance” (whether public or private).  I think that if you are an adult, you have comprehensive and affordable options available to you, and you don’t want coverage, that should be your right—as should paying your own medical bills.  I am in favor of making good insurance affordable to everyone who wants it, and to all children regardless of what their parents want.

I am against caps on malpractice settlements.  What’s your eyesight worth to you?  What about your limbs?  What about the life of a loved one?  You see the problem with this.

I am in favor of passing a law allowing people to sue their health insurance providers.

I am in favor of having a strong federal committee to regulate the private insurance industry, but I am concerned about it becoming corrupted whenever a President or a Congress came in that didn’t want the insurance industry regulated.  Any means of making this committee robust rather than subject to the partisan whims of the time, I would be in favor of.

I am in favor of decoupling health insurance from employment.  If employers want to offer a group policy, that’s fine, but I do not support automatic enrollment of employees.

And with the exception of my tort reform opinion, I don’t see what’s so controversial about any of this.  But then, I’m not taking in thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.