...That net loss of 22 million covered people would come about, says the CBO, “primarily because the penalty for not having insurance would be eliminated.” This puts a whole lot of policy weight on a mandate that is, by the consensus of most experts I’ve spoken to, already far too weak to do the job it was designed for (namely, forcing healthy folks to buy insurance).
The mandate penalty actually phased in over several years -- starting at $95 or 1 percent of income in 2014 (whichever was higher), rising to $325 or 2 percent in 2015, and maturing to its full adult size of $695 or 2.5 percent of income in 2016. Given how much stiffer the mandate penalties got as the years progressed, if the mandate were very effective at getting people to buy insurance, then I’d expect to see substantial growth in the number of folks buying insurance on the exchanges as folks got hit with an ugly tax bill, and decided they’d be better off paying premiums to insurers than penalties to Uncle Sam. Instead we saw a flood of new customers the first year, a slowing trickle in subsequent years, and in 2017, a slight ebb tide. This does not look to me like a mandate that’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting in Obamacare’s coverage gains. And I’m not the only one who looks at the mandate and sees … not much there.
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