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Making someone else pay
...This is exactly the spirit of Obamacare. The animating drive is to transfer: mainly money, from those who pay to those who need. The strongest appeal of Democrats' plans is that you needn't worry about coverage because someone, presumably a villain, will pay for it.

Who, exactly?

Ask first who won't pay. Doctors? Maybe not. One reason the Senate's latest plan didn't worsen the deficit by the $1 trillion that congressional accountants earlier reckoned was that its writers hid huge sums in Medicare payments off the books. They did this to buy the support of the American Medical Association. Doctors are right not to want to be shafted. Trust that they'll lobby to make sure of it.

Insurance companies won't. Their pleas will be heard, bailouts granted. The industry, in fact, seemed to be going along with Obamacare in hopes of finding a utility-like role in a government-dominated system.

You, however, may have an ATM-like role. The plan assembled by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) dictates premiums on a sliding scale - 12% of income, about $8,700 a year, for the median Waukesha County family, for instance. We'll all be paying extra to cover people who earn less. Those figures assume, by the way, massive, improbable cuts in costs.

Who else pays? The healthy: Patsies who obey the law and buy insurance before they're sick. Their premiums will cover those who don't bother until they've incurred huge bills.

Mainly, the young will pay. They tend to use less care. Obamacare depends on this: Young workers' premiums are needed to fill the pool as aging workers drain it. That's how insurance works, they say. They mistake insurance, which pools similar risks, with the pooling of known dissimilar costs, which is called a raw deal.

The arrangement is like another "compact between generations," Medicare, in which young workers pay with the expectation of collecting later. But Medicare, which works fine for now, will be insolvent by 2017, say its trustees. The young will pay for that now and later.

The real winners in Obamacare aren't the elderly. They're already covered, though Baucus' plan cuts Medicare massively. It is, rather, the pre-retirement demographic, not old enough for Medicare, insured but worried, and costly to cover.

Such people usually are in their peak earning years. They've had time to save up, pay off the mortgage. They are typically far better off than the young who will subsidize them. Yet Congress would transfer huge sums from low-wealth twentysomethings to higher-wealth boomers.

And the young will pay still more. Congress' plans portend huge deficits, even before the evaporation of reformers' fantasies about cutting costs. This will be funded by unprecedented debt. The costs will be paid later, by citizens now so young as to not yet be born....