lifetime so you pay more when young and healthy and less later in life. It just flattens the cost curve over your lifetime which is part of the goal of insurance. But the approach was flawed.

We put a 3X cap on premiums. Great for those getting in on the late stages like most of us here, but makes it much more expensive for the young and increases their incentive to go uninsured. More importantly to pols, it appeals to older voters that pay attention and are more likely to vote than millennials.

We put letting kids stay on until 26. Helps ease the pain of increases for the middle age voters because they think they're getting something for "free", but in reality we're just rolling more cost into that policy by having more people covered under it longer.

We assumed young folks would buy into that flattening of the cost curve concept. But we "woke" them with the sticker shock at 26. And this is a generation that literally their entire lives they've heard that SS and Medicare would be broke when they got there (shoot our generation has heard that), so why on Earth would we expect them to believe this benefit would still be there when they got old? They're not stupid.

The House plan, as flawed as it was, at least tried to address that problem a little (min 5X cap among other things), and had some improvements from the current situation IMO. Unfortunately that POS Mitch called it DOA and then proceeded to give us even worse that understandably couldn't even pass.