Pros And Cons Of The Individual Mandate

Some people believe that the ACA would not have worked without the individual mandate. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that “64 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of the mandate in 2014—the year the mandate went into effect.”5 Americans had this view, because they did not like the fact that the government was making them buy health insurance. The mandate formed because the ACA provided individuals in high-risk pools the ability to purchase insurance. High-risk pools have people who need more coverage, and are therefore more expensive. The only way to keep the balance of the pools was to include a lot of low-risk people. Insurance companies can make a profit off of low-risk people, and that is why the individual mandate is needed.

The insurance mandate makes it affordable for those high-risk individuals. This may appear unfair for the young and healthy who believe they do not need insurance. However, it is not fair for those with pre-existing conditions and are denied coverage (i.e., cancer, pregnant, mental health issues, and etc.). There is no feasible way to “have your cake and eat it too; you can’t let some people choose not to purchase insurance and still cover all the riskier, more expensive people who want insurance—there's just not enough money to go around.”5 For those individuals who are healthy but fall ill or get into an accident, they will get the coverage they need instead of paying all of it out-of-pocket. Although, the ACA is not perfect, an additional 16 million Americans have coverage and uninsured rates have gone down to 10.4 percent. The only way this was possible was through the individual mandate.5 An additional problem that individual mandate tackles is the free-rider problem. Individual mandates minimize the free-rider problem by making it a legal requirement that individuals carry their own insurance