Young adults are going to run the numbers and take a pass on FHer-care

As Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito points out, they look at the $854 per year they're paying now for health care and compare it to the $5400 that a gummint-approved policy would cost, and then factor in the piddling penalty they'll pay - or maybe get out of paying - and say, "No thanks."

Holman Jenkins at the WSJ says that one thing missing from most MSM coverage of how FHer-care is going to "work" is an examination of why prices for health-care goods and services are much more distorted than one sees in other economic sectors:

For 30 years, journalists have been "investigating" hospital pricing, which is neither competitive nor closely related to cost, invariably throwing up their hands and saying government must fix matters. Yet any reasoned analysis shows that government policy is why we have such a byzantine payment system in the first place, in which an ever-inflating health-care bill is allocated among "payer" groups via opaque political bargaining.

Why isn't the same mess seen in other realms of the economy? In the automobile market, dealers publish prices on their websites and in ads that are always lower than the sticker prices. Why?

Independent websites like Edmunds.com, AutoTrader.com and Kelley Blue Book publish detailed pricing information for consumers and do so for free. Why?

The answer is obvious. Consumers want such information and businesses see opportunity in providing it, even for free, in order to attract eyeballs for advertising.

Such information doesn't exist in health care because consumers don't demand it, because somebody else is almost always paying for our health care. Those of us who aren't subsidized directly by Medicaid, Medicare and the Veterans Administration are subsidized through the tax code to channel all our aches and pains through a third-party payment mill, disguised as employer-provided "insurance."

The fact that this makes such immanent sense is probably why it has such a difficult time getting an airing in our society's public-policy conversations.  Sensible solutions don't permit any interested parties to get a leg up on everybody else.