TPM: "Premiums do not reflect the full cost of coverage."

[pnwmom]

82. The experience of NY State has already proved that that won't work.

NY already has guaranteed insurance without a mandate, and insurance rates have gone up and up as more and more healthy people leave the system.

There's no way Congress would have passed the ACA without the mandate. Again, it barely passed as it was.

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/July/19/new-york-and-individual-mandate.aspx

Analysis: N.Y. Insurance Market Called 'Poster Child' For Individual Mandate

The nosedive in health insurance prices that New York officials announced earlier this week was driven by many factors, but the most important was the individual mandate, a central component of Obamacare.

That’s because insurers are betting they can use that often reviled requirement that takes effect Jan. 1 to nag, nudge, push and prod 2.6 million uninsured New Yorkers, especially the young and healthy, to buy coverage.

What happens in New York won’t happen in the rest of the country. No one should expect premiums to drop by 50 percent anywhere else. New York is an anomaly. It’s big. It’s expensive. It’s a place where people use a lot of health care services, and there are a lot of insurers in the game. It’s also highly regulated. People who buy their own insurance can easily pay $20,000 a year for coverage; Cut that in half, and the prices are still exorbitant


But the main thing that’s different about New York is that the state passed many of the health insurance reforms that are part of Obamacare (along with some that are not) many years ago, only without an individual mandate.

“New York is like the poster child for why you need an individual mandate,” said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reform. “They implemented all the reforms without the individual mandate, and premiums just went through the roof.”

SNIP