Despite facing legal challenges, health care reform is already extending coverage to millions of young Americans.

According to a revision of official estimates released last week, 2.5 million young Americans aged 19-25 have gained health care coverage since September 2010. A little over a year ago, 64.4 percent of young Americans had health insurance; since then, that proportion has risen to 72.7 percent. This is great news, as an increasing number of us 20-somethings with health insurance no longer have to live uncertain of our health care coverage. Known collectively (and pejoratively) as the "invincibles," Americans aged 19-25 are accustomed to being left in the blind spot of health coverage. Let's hope those days are over.

So far, as the mounting evidence can tell us, the boom in coverage seems to be an effect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Indeed, not only were more insured between the ages of 19-25 in the second quarter of 2011 compared to the third quarter of 2010, but coverage by like programs (such as Medicaid) has fallen in that period. With lower disposable incomes in this recession, fewer Americans have the resources to purchase health insurance for their children outright. If programs like Medicaid and private consumption are not insuring young people, the inescapable conclusion is that the Affordable Care Act is responsible for the latest increase in coverage.

This early success for health care reform is especially significant given that the law is under fire in several states and in the courts. In addition to the challenge brought against the ACA's individual mandate, 26 states attorneys general are seeking to repeal the law in its entirety. Moreover, the National Conference of State Legislatures has recorded actions from 45 state legislatures that "have proposed legislation to limit, alter or oppose selected state or federal actions" in compliance with the law. Consider for a moment that much of the legislation's core features, including the controversial individual mandate, will not even activate until 2014.

Sign up for weekly ND20 highlights, mind-blowing stats, and event alerts.

With this context in mind, the real news here is that health care reform is not imploding on take off, raining fire and destruction on a population in need. If any group has underestimated the impact of the Affordable Care Act, that group is its proponents. According to official estimates released at the beginning of fall, health care reform was expected to cover an additional 1 million young adults. The newest numbers, which peg the actual increase closer to 2.5 million, show the Affordable Care Act doing even better than we thought it would despite the many doomsday scenarios concocted by its staunch opponents.

It may be too early to expand other projections about the impact of reform, so let us instead recall what benefits we have to look forward to by recounting past estimates. Among the many projections made by the President's Council of Economic Advisers, the ACA is estimated to "increase net economic well-being by roughly $100 billion a year" and increase real GDP by 8 percent through 2030 relative to the no-reform baseline. The Congressional Budget Office also links a "net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion over the 2010-2019 period" to the Affordable Care Act.

With the Supreme Court set to take up health care reform in the coming months and state governments continuing to create political hurdles for it to overcome, it is worth stressing that the benefits of reform have been meeting and exceeding expectations. As it becomes clearer that this law is helping to build a future where more have access to care, we must consider what the opponents of reform are really against.

Rajiv Narayan is the Senior Fellow for Health Care Policy at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a graduating senior at the University of California, Davis.

Many Millennials have noble ambitions, but starting an organization that can achieve their goals requires patience and research.

A couple of national news outlets have published stories recently (like this one and this one) that suggest today's young people are uncommonly entrepreneurial. Meanwhile, well-known groups like Echoing Green, the Clinton Global Initiative, and the Hitachi Foundation are offering big rewards to young people who apply their enterprising minds to ridding the world of social ills. These efforts facilitate and respond to Millenials' penchant for starting "social ventures." They create organizations -- for-profit or non-profit -- that deploy businesslike efficiency in addressing unmet needs in a community or society.

It makes sense that starting social ventures has become popular among young people. After all, institutions that once attracted droves of ambitious college students -- like investment banks and government agencies -- have lost their luster. Newly-minted lawyers find their schooling has left them ill-equipped for the real world. Even big charities connote bureaucratic sloth to young people skeptical of large institutions.

It's important to note, though, that although starting social ventures is in vogue, it is not always the best approach to addressing the issues that irk young people. In many cases, working for an existing organization or advocating for a policy change offers a better shot at meeting their goals.

Anyone who thinks about starting a social venture should ask three questions before proceeding:

1. What does success look like?

In 2008, a college classmate named Rohan Mathew and I started the Intersect Fund, a New Jersey nonprofit that offers business training and loans to low-income entrepreneurs. Our goal is to be a strong ally for individuals in our state who want to start a business but lack the resources to do it. Having set up a system to make a lot of small loans, we see no reason why we can't eventually lend to all "micro-businesses" (those with five or fewer employees) in our state that need our services.

We would view such deep market penetration as a success, but we could have taken a different approach to economic development. If our goal, for instance, were making loans easier to get throughout the country, the best approach may have been to advocate for a stronger Small Business Administration more attuned to the needs of nascent microbusinesses. If there had been a well-regarded microlender already working in our area with our target market, we might have sought to join forces with them, perhaps helping them to adopt some of the technology-based solutions that have become such a big factor in our work.

Sign up to have the Daily Digest, a witty take on the morning’s key headlines, delivered straight to your inbox.

2. Am I capable of marketing and delivering the service I seek to offer?

Keep in mind that need doesn't necessarily equal demand. When we got started, for example, we knew our city had high rates of poverty and unemployment. We also had a sense that many residents tried to start a business but failed due to a lack of money and accounting skills.

Given these conditions, we thought people would be beating down our doors for financing. To our surprise, the first year was pretty quiet. A steady stream of clients enrolled in and enjoyed our business training course, but we disbursed only three loans. It wasn't until we gained a reputation in the community and recruited staff who could speak our borrowers' language (this one seems pretty obvious in hindsight) that we were able to ramp up our lending.

We learned later than we should have that without capacity and connections, good intentions are useless.

3. Is anyone else already doing what I want to do?

Think hard about this one. If young entrepreneurs know of an effective organization in their community that already delivers the service they want to provide, they should try to work with it. If they try to start a competitor, they'll struggle to secure funding and community partners.

However, if the other organization is proving ineffective, it may be fair game for competition. If young entrepreneurs think they have a better approach than the one their competitors use, or that they could do the work just as well but with less overhead, they may want to give it a shot.

If no organization does anything remotely similar to what they want to do, they should ask themselves why. Consider the old example of the shoe salesmen sent to scout out new country for a potential expansion only to find that its residents wore no shoes. One wrote back, "There's a great opportunity here, everyone needs shoes!" The other was pessimistic: "It's hopeless, no one here even wears shoes."

Optimism is essential to starting any venture, but so is market research. It's important for young entrepreneurs to speak with community stakeholders and offer a scaled-down version of their service to gauge demand before launching a full-scale effort. The issues they seek to address are no doubt worthwhile. They owe it to themselves and their potential clients to approach it the right way.

Joe Shure is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow and co-founder and associate director of the Intersect Fund.

High unemployment pushed young people in the Middle East and North Africa to revolt. Why wouldn't it happen here?

Is it useful to think of the Occupy movement more as a "left" movement or a "youth" movement? To answer that question, it's worth looking into data on the young, particularly as it relates to unemployment.

To leave the United States for a minute, one way people are trying to understand the Arab Spring is through the lens of massive youth unemployment and inequality. Given how high unemployment has been in these MENA (Middle-East and North African) countries, what else could we expect besides revolution?

For instance, in early February then-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn told a conference, "this summer I made a speech in Morocco about the question of youth employment including Egypt, Tunisia, saying it is a kind of time bomb" and "such a high level of unemployment, especially youth unemployment, and such a high level of inequality in the country create a social situation that may end in unrest." Here is the "youth unemployment" blog tag at the IMF to give you a sense of what people there have been saying about it. In particular, they point out that it should be a major concern for the MENA and African regions.

Interestingly enough, it was even a concern before the mass protests broke out. Regional IMF officials Ratna Sahay and Alan MacArthur gave a presentation on January 23rd, "Challenges for Egypt in the Post Crisis World," at the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies in Cairo (h/t WSJ). Protests would begin a few days later. Here's a key slide from that presentation:

Part of you may want to immediately start pointing out differences between this country and those. Maybe you are furious at terrible, unresponsive, corrupt governments ignoring the plight of their populations. Maybe you think that if these countries only had neoliberal, "flexible" wage contracts and a leakier safety net like we have in the United States, then unemployment would be much better.

You may then head over to our monthly unemployment numbers and note that American youth unemployment is in the same ballpark as these MENA countries.

Sign up to have the Daily Digest, a witty take on the morning’s key headlines, delivered straight to your inbox.

I've taken numbers from the IMF presentation slide above and compared them to the United States' youth unemployment averages from October 2010-October 2011 from the BLS's CPS data:

I can't find what constitutes "youth" for "youth unemployment" in the IMF's definition, and I'm not even sure if it is consistent across the different countries they estimated. As such, I'm including ages 16-19 and ages 16-24, though I believe they are looking at 16-24. For the 16-19 age group, we are at the same level of unemployment as Egypt and well above the region as a whole. At the broader 16-24 range, we are above Syria and Morocco, which both saw large-scale movements in the Arab Spring.

One potential explanation for the high level of youth unemployment in MENA countries is that they have huge demographic issues to deal with -- they have a massive wave of people under 35 years of age to assimilate into their economies. What's our excuse, other than confidence fairy terror spells and a desire to go after public sector workers? And given this, how could we ever say youth unemployment in the United States' Lesser Depression isn't a "time bomb"?

I have to admit I'm a bit hardened to the various charts I'm able to put together from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' data, but this graph of the employment-to-population ratio for 16-24-year-olds going back to 1948 floored me:

Remember that the increase from the 1950s onward reflects women entering the labor force. And notice how it doesn't improve after the early 2000s recession. Every age group has seen a substantial drop in the employment-population ratio, but no other group I've seen comes close to this plummet. For the first time in half a century, a majority of young people aren't working.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

How can we create regular and lucrative opportunities for recent graduates in industries other than finance and consulting?

The national Occupy movement has focused the nation on the fact that our economy is broken. Today, millions of Americans are clamoring for an alternate vision of the America economy. For recent graduates, a lack of regular and lucrative opportunities in next economy industries creates a dangerous hole in the progressive movement, threatening to convince a generation that neither side of the political spectrum has a growth-oriented economic strategy that can offer them employment.

The banking, financial, and consulting industries, while by no means evil, are places that have proven to be better at dividing the pie than growing it. If we want a pro-growth strategy for the economy, we need to be serious about making sure that America's best minds are going into the industries we believe can drive an economic renaissance.

In a recent article titled "Stop the Wall Street Recruitment," the authors point to astonishing statistics: "In 2010, even after the economic crisis, the financial services industry drew a full 20 percent of Harvard graduates and over 15 percent of Stanford and MIT graduates."

A robust alternate pipeline for talent within industries deemed to be values- and growth-oriented by the progressive movement does not exist. A look at the requirements for associate level positions in industries such as clean tech, social entrepreneurship, or micro finance reveals a stunning fact: they mostly want experience from the industries they are looking to subvert, namely consulting, finance, and banking. High achievers at America's top universities, bastions for progressive thought, are faced with a stark decision upon entering the workforce -- sacrifice your progressive ideals or your pocketbooks.

Sign up to have the Daily Digest, a witty take on the morning’s news, delivered straight to your inbox.

By no means is this simply about money. The financial industry has built a sophisticated recruitment machine that emphasizes dependability in terms of opportunities and results. Because these industries have created annual recruitment cycles for regularly recurring positions, students can pursue positions from day one of college. These students also know that in exchange for a two-year commitment they will receive training, incredible networking opportunities, and be provided with unparalleled opportunities upon leaving.

Because the skills in those industries are deemed so valuable, for a humanities student who wants to go into clean tech or micro lending, the clearest path is to take a two-year diversion in one of those industries. In essence we are asking our prospective progressive leaders to sleep in the lion's den.

In conjunction with the Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline's first conference in New York yesterday, I will be launching an initiative to begin a solutions-oriented dialogue around this issue, with the goal of locating and building out the resources necessary to strengthen the progressive career pipeline. By defining a clearer path for our best and brightest to enter values-oriented and pro-growth industries, we have the opportunity to define a new generation of progressivism that will help shift our country to being competitive in the economy of the future.

If we hope to provide a compelling alternative to an economy driven by financial trading, shorting, and hedging, we must first show that the pillars of the new economy can provide regular and lucrative opportunities for our best and brightest.

Daniel Golfarb is a board member of the Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline. He is the former program director for Americans for Energy Leadership and currently a fall associate at Greenstart, a cleantech accelerator in San Francisco.