Hayley Waring writes for the College Conservative. In a new post, she urges other conservative students not to remain silent.

Young Conservatives: Speak Up!

A disturbing exchange recently occurred in one of my political science classes when one of my classmates was giving a presentation on Obamacare. She explained that the law would not affect 85% of Americans who already had health insurance, but the 15% of Americans who did not have health insurance would benefit from it.

At the end of her presentation, which to be fair was largely unbiased, she opened the floor for questions. I raised my hand and pointed out that over 3 million of those 85% of insured Americans had been dropped from their current plans. I asked her if, knowing that information, she would still concede that those Americans were completely unaffected. She was surprised to hear those numbers, but stated that she still believed the administration didn’t foresee such a negative side effect.

When I mentioned the memo that Forbes had released confirming that officials in the Obama administration projected as early as 2010 that 93 million Americans could lose their current plan, she had no response.

But my professor did, and she seemed bothered by my inquiry. (This is a professor who told us only weeks earlier that she took pride in learning that students could not tell her political persuasion.) She brushed off my remarks and essentially told the class that the reasons those plans are being cancelled is because they don’t cover everything that people might need.

The implication of her assertion is that the government knows what a good insurance plan should contain, so they enacted regulations that force companies to comply or drop their current plans. Sounds great, right? The government is simply behaving like parents who know what is best for their little children; they have swooped in and begun to play the role of puppeteer in the lives of their subjects.

There’s just one problem: we are not children, and the government has no valid reason to treat us as such.