Add University of Connecticut student Brian McCarty to the list of young Americans unhappy with Obamacare.

President Obama’s repeated claim that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” has come back to haunt him in recent weeks as millions of Americans received cancellation notices stating their plans did not provide sufficient coverage under the Affordable Care Act. While some are lambasting the president as a “liar,” this particular untruth was blatantly false even when he uttered it. Minimum coverage provisions have always been a critical element of Obamacare and it follows that plans not meeting these provisions would be canceled. It should not have taken the actual issuance of the notices to reveal the president’s claims as untrue. Yet many have subsequently criticized the president, notably former President Bill Clinton, who argued, “even if it takes a change in the law, the president should honor the commitment that the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.”

This is an issue President Obama never wanted to deal with. While he knowingly misled the American public, he operated under the assumption that anyone who lost their current plan due to Obamacare would be able to enroll in the online health care exchanges to sign up for federally-subsidized plans with broader coverage. Unfortunately, few Americans have been able to access this website due to substantial technical problems. Therefore, individuals with canceled plans currently have no affordable insurance options, in contradiction to the mission of the ACA. This reality, combined with calls for action by President Clinton and others, led Obama to declare a “fix.” He announced that all those whose plans had recently been dropped would be able to renew them for one year, assuming the online marketplace will be functional and able to accept them by then.

However, this declaration does not automatically renew canceled plans. …

Unfortunately, there may be more problems with the exchanges than the website. It seems that the vast majority of people enrolling in the exchanges have been older people with preexisting conditions, those most at a disadvantage under the previous system. The enrollment of young, healthy individuals has been minimal. This creates an extremely risky pool in the exchanges that consumes more in health care services than it contributes in premiums. This will cause insurance companies to increase premiums, which will cause some people to drop their plans, further increasing premiums, ultimately resulting in what has been called an “insurance death spiral.” Because the exchanges are federally subsidized, they may be able to keep the premiums down for consumers and delay the death spiral for a time, but young healthy people must start enrolling in the exchanges in large numbers to keep the exchanges sustainable bodies that offer insurance at reasonable premiums. If the fix works, young people will be incentivized to keep their current plans, making the exchanges more risky and unstable come October 2014. If it does not, individuals may lose their health care next year. Either way, the likelihood of the fix improving anything is a murky prospect at best.