The vast majority of observers believe that for Obamacare to work financially, young healthy people will have to sign up as a counterweight for the older Americans who will require higher payouts from the insurance companies. Even the White House has said for the plan to work at least one-third of the plan's participants need to be millennials. 

On ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean stated the White House projection was wrong. Dean then went on to opine the Republican Party should share the blame for Obamacare's failure, because they constantly opposed the legislation and because they were successful in defunding parts of Obamacare.

Panelist S.E. Cupp described that Obamcare was in trouble because the millennials do not like the website, and they are not "wired" to register via telephone. That's when Howard Dean jumped in:

I will have to disagree with S.E.. And this has been written about by many, many people so I am not just picking on her. It's not true that if young people don't sign up the program doesn't work. That's false. The reason --

Stephanopoulos:

The White House said they have to have a third of the people that have to be young people.

Dean:

That's not true, actually, because what...the reason that is framed as being true is, everybody assumes you can't do a community rating, without an individual mandate, and that's not true. And I know that because I did it 20 years ago, we did most of the stuff that’s in Obamacare. We have all -- almost every child under 18 has had health insurance in our state for almost 20 years. And we had community rating, really tough community rating where you couldn't charge 20% more than your base rate to anybody in the state and you couldn't discriminate against anybody for pre-existing conditions. We have had this for 20 years.

Stephanopoulos:

Relatively small community, can it work nationwide?

Dean:

Of course it can work nationwide. The problem is the scale. It probably would have been better to have four or five regional exchanges than one big exchange. They didn't know 34 states were going to refuse to participate in the exchanges. We can fault the Obama Administration; certainly there are fault to be had here. I should add that Republicans bear some responsibility for this, because they opposed, opposed, and opposed, they actually did defund part of Obamacare. The 44 votes that took to kill it didn’t do anything but there was stuff attached to riders.  Everything that the Obama Administration had to do they had to go upstream against Republicans trying to kill this program no matter what and there is some responsibility they bear as well.

If the Republicans had indeed defunded parts of Obamacare as Dean contends they would have bragged about it on every news program on which they appeared.