I was at Congressman Bill Pascrell's town-hall meeting on health care reform at Montclair State University last week when I turned on my laptop and discovered an e-mail from my nephew Tim.

He lives in California and is in his mid 20s. And that means he is among the many young Americans who will be forced to finance health-care reform -- whether they like it or not.

As I've noted in prior columns, the Democrats do not hide the fact that the young will be the cash cow for any reform scheme. Because young people are healthier than average, they will pay more in premiums than they consume in services. That's great for guys in their late 50s like me, but not so great for people in their 20s.And some of them are figuring it out. The e-mail contained a link to an article posted on a couple of progressive blogs.

The author was Robert Cruikshank, whose biography identifies him as "an activist on progressive California causes."

Left-wing he may be, but Cruikshank's not stupid. After noting that Obama's health care reform plan is most popular among those in the 18-to-29 demographic, he notes the effect that plan would have on young people. He compares the views of a liberal think tank to those of the free-market Cato Institute.

"As much as it pains me to say this, the guy from Cato is right," Cruikshank writes. "Mandated insurance without a public option offers nothing of value whatsoever to younger people. That's because it's not designed to help us. It's designed to extract even more money from our already meager bank accounts and deliver us virtually nothing in return."

Precisely. Many young people have the mistaken belief that the Democratic plan would provide them cheap health insurance. Nope. That's the Republican plan. And I couldn't help but note how skillfully Pascrell dodged a question on that exact point.

When a woman asked why the plan doesn't permit people to buy health insurance across state lines, Pascrell ignored that part of her question and instead focused on something she'd said about tort reform -- an issue he also dodged with consummate skill. The man's a pro.

But the question of why the Democrats don't want to see an open market in health insurance is crucial to the plan's effect on the young. So after the hearing I called the guy from Cato, Michael Tanner, to discuss this.

Tanner told me that if young people could buy coverage across state lines, they could get some really good deals. That's because some states, such as Idaho, have few if any mandates for what is covered. A healthy 25-year-old can buy coverage from an Idaho company for a mere $37.50 a month. That insurance has a very high deductible, $5,000, and doesn't cover much. But young people don't need much coverage.

"Obama keeps talking about how little competition there is in the health-insurance market," said Tanner. "Well if he opened it up, young people who are computer savvy would go and buy insurance in Idaho."

Instead, the Democrats' plan call for setting a minimum standard that would apply in every state in the nation. It also calls for community rating, a system under which young people are charged an artificially high price so we oldsters can pay an artificially low price.

Bye-bye bargains. The kids become cash cows.

So why was the hall packed mainly with older people while the college kids outside walked by blissfully unaware of their fate? Perhaps the kids weren't pondering the effect the plan would have on another issue crucial to their lives: pizza. One questioner told the congressman that all the pizzeria owners she knew said they'd be driven out of business by the cost of providing health insurance to their workers.

Pascrell assured her that he himself is a pizza lover and that the bill would have no such effect. Tanner disagrees. The two versions of the bill now in House committees would set a very low threshold for mandatory coverage by businesses. A pizzeria with an annual payroll as low as $200,000 could be required to provide its employees with health insurance or face a tax equal to 8 percent of payroll, Tanner said.

And pizzerias wouldn't be the only small businesses hit by this provision. Pizza may be more of a Jersey issue, but do those California kids ever think about whether Silicon Valley would have come into existence if all of those start-ups had to pay an 8 percent payroll tax?

More to the point, do they realize that this plan puts them at the mercy of the very same public and private bureaucracies they spend most of their time decrying?

Obviously not. There's a great opportunity for Republicans to make inroads among young voters on this issue. Unfortunately, the national GOP leadership is on life support.

Where are those death panels when you need them?

Clueless liberal alert: I note that various clueless liberals have been commenting on the public option as mentioned by Cruikshank and asking why I didn't explain why it's a better alternative for the young.

Because it's not. It would be just as heavily weighted against the young, for reasons that should be obvious to any intelligent person.

And because I have already written extensively about that, quoting another Cato scholar. I would strongly recommend that Cruikshank and every young person in America stop listening to Barack Obama and start listening to Jogadeesh Gokhale.

Here's an excerpt. Read the whole thing before commenting on the public option::

That's the theory of an economist who's been studying this issue very intently, Jogadeesh Gokhale of the free-market Cato Institute. The real reason the Democrats want to push young people into the public option, says Gokhale, is that their premiums can be used to put a Band-Aid on Medicare, which is going broke. "This is basically generational warfare," he said.

In Gokhale's opinion, and mine, opponents of the plan are making a mistake by focusing on the public option. The real problem is the individual mandate. "Without the mandate, the young won't sign up," he said.

But once the mandate's in place, the feds can keep ratcheting up the requirements for private health plans so that young people are forced to take the public option. And then the kids become the cash cows for us baby boomers.