Insurance Mandate

Many of the candidates are proposing that health insurance be mandated or required. In other words, the public would have to buy it like they now buy auto insurance. I recently read a letter sent into the WSJ which calls a health insurance mandate “unenforceable and disingenuous”. The author, John Powers, makes this claim on the basis that our laws are based on English common law that refuses to impose upon individuals any positive duty whose breach would constitute a crime. An example would be getting people to wear motorcycle helmets.

I don’t fully agree with him on this but I do understand where he is coming from. Unless we would be able to stop “bailing” out those who refuse to pay into health insurance, it wouldn’t work. And that was his real point. If you have a mandated health insurance policy intertwined with socialized medicine then once you become weak on the mandate all you have left is socialized medicine. And a whole more taxes.

What is your opinion about this? I would love to hear it.