This story has been circulating way before Obama came along, indeed Snopes tags this email as an Urban Legend. Despite its unknown provenance, we know that a similar experiment done today would yield exactly the same results.

However...

In real life, after a few bad test results, the better students would ask to go to another class. If the teacher said that was forbidden, then the students would try to go to another school, one without such a share-the-grades system. If the school system made that verboten as well then our enterprising young adults would leave for another city, another school system. But if the whole country established such a system then it would find that it would have to forbid better students from emigrating altogether.

In order for socialism to work, opting out of the system has to be forbidden. In the end everyone wants to leave, even the poor and the downtrodden.

Under Capitalism, opting out is not forbidden, you can leave America anytime you want. In the end everyone wants to come here, especially the poor and the downtrodden.

Obama knows this as well, which is why all his programs require penalties for those who wish to opt out.

If his healthcare program is so good, why does it require stiff penalties ¹ if you don't want it?

Simple question.

Notes

(1):

USA Today, The good, bad of Obama's health care plan

Now, what about this so-called mandate requiring small business owners to provide health insurance or face a government fine? That is more troubling. Under the House measure, employers with payrolls of more than $400,000 a year will be required to provide health insurance or pay an 8% penalty. Businesses whose payroll falls between $250,000 and $400,000 a year would pay a lesser penalty. Businesses with fewer than $250,000 in payroll would be exempt. A Senate version would exempt employers with fewer than 25 employees, and the fine for bigger companies not complying would be $750 fine per employee per year.

Those are some scary numbers, especially in a recession. The administration says that insuring more people and providing a public option will bring the costs of insuring employees way down, thus making the mandate far more doable than it might otherwise look. Would it work? It better, because insuring people at today's costs verges on impossible and penalties are the last thing we need.

WSJ Smart Money, Tax Hit if Your Health Coverage Isn't 'Acceptable'

Say you have an individual health insurance policy because you're self-employed or work for a small company that doesn't provide coverage. Under the new law, your current plan might be deemed "unacceptable" to the feds if it has a lifetime limit on benefits or for some other reason that would take too long to explain here. A grandfather provision would allow you to keep your plan as long as you don't make any changes (like increasing the deductible to keep the cost down). But if you do make changes, you would be forced to switch to an "acceptable" plan or get hit with a penalty tax. The proposed penalty: up to 2.5% of the difference between your adjusted gross income (the number on the bottom of page 1 of your Form 1040) and the minimum amount of income that requires filing a federal return. For most folks, this figure ranges between $9,350 and $18,700 for 2009. For example, if you're a married joint-filer with adjusted gross income of $80,000, the penalty tax could be slightly over $1,500, based on 2009 numbers.

Even if you want to keep your existing "grandfathered" plan without making any changes, it's likely to go out of business before long because the new law would prevent that plan from enrolling any new members.