Catherine Rampell reports in Economix that young people are not avoiding health insurance out of a desire to avoid paying for immoral old sick people but because insurance provided by the individual insurance market is simply too expensive. They can and do choose jobs that provide them with cheaper group insurance when such jobs are available and they would probably choose individual insurance if it were cheaper.

Now only a part of the pricing of individual insurance plans reflects genuine risk. The rest is a result of the market power of our large national health insurance companies and the general fear, on the part of health insurers of actually paying benefits to sick people. If we could eliminate these, through regulation or a public option, we might well see a significant rise in the number insured and a decrease in average costs per insured.

The sort of regulation that Wonks Anonymous has in mind is enforcement of anti-trust laws, mandatory issue of insurance with well defined comprehensive benefits and pricing based on community medical costs.

In this case mandates and subsidies would also make sense. If everyone gets health care - and they do thanks to EMTALA which forces hospitals to care for all regardless of their ability to pay - we need to make everyone pay what they can for this care.