High Cost to Getting Rid of Affordable Care Act Mandate

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Washington-Watch/Reform/31197?utm_content=&utm_medium

By Joyce Frieden, News Editor, MedPage Today
Published: February 16, 2012

Premiums in the health insurance exchanges would not rise sharply if the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate requirement is overturned or repealed, but government spending could more than double and fewer people would be covered, according to a study by the RAND Corporation.

"We find that the elimination of the individual mandate leads to a 12.5-million-person reduction in the number of newly insured individuals and increases government spending per newly insured individual by a factor of more than two," the authors wrote.

"While we find that average exchange premiums increase by approximately 9.3% when the individual mandate is eliminated, this finding is mostly driven by compositional effects. The increase in premiums that would be faced by any given individual is only 2.4%."

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