The Overlooked Mandate Issue
While the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments this week on the constitutionality of the individual mandate provisions of the Affordable Care Act, another serious concern about the mandate didn’t involve constitutional issues and stayed relatively unnoticed.
Is the individual mandate sufficient to achieve its intended goal, to bring healthy Americans into the health insurance pool? In answering this question, the stakes are high. If millions of currently uninsured Americans choose to remain without coverage, and simply pay the noncompliance penalty instead, serious questions are raised as to whether other insurance reforms can take effect – most importantly, eliminating pre-existing conditions as a barrier to coverage – without destabilizing the marketplace.
This is a legitimate worry. In 2014, a person who chooses to remain uninsured would be penalized $95 or one percent of adjusted taxable income, whichever is greater. And even when the penalty is fully implemented in 2016, the penalty will be the greater amount of $695 or 2.5 percent of adjusted taxable income. These penalties will still be less than the cost of purchasing health coverage.
As University of Illinois law professor Richard L. Kaplan put it, accurately, “(A) person might choose not to buy health insurance, opting to wait until something medically unfortunate happens. Insurance companies will not be able to refuse her at that point, a situation that might imperil the private insurance market.”
Even if the Court upholds the constitutionality of the individual mandate, lawmakers can’t complacently assume that it will be strong enough to move uninsured citizens into the insurance marketplace. It would be worth studying the efficacy of other incentive programs, such as those used by the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. Part D has utilized both limited enrollment windows as well as higher costs for those who delay enrollment.
The goal of incentivizing Americans to acquire health insurance is a good and necessary one. It’s necessary, though, to keep in mind that the constitutionality of the individual mandate may be the most visible issue, but it’s far from the only one.
