I'm not sure how you can say that it was very effective, since this is the first year that the mandate goes into effect in Mass. No one knows yet how effective this program will be, and it is already encountering significant problems. All eyes are on Mass to see how this will play out, but no one knows just yet.
There are a lot of problems with forcing people to buy insurance. There are sometimes good reasons why people don't have insurance...because they don't want it. The way that the number of "uninsured Americans" is calculated leaves much to be desired. They count everyone as "uninsured" if they lack insurance for a few weeks, which means I would be counted since when I switched insurance, I went without for about a month. The numbers are made to be large and scary. But why force people to buy something they don't want? The main problem with this is that it is a huge boon to the insurance companies, which already have too much power in the health care process, in my opinion. Suddenly, they have a government mandated product. This would make insurance reform next to impossible. (Contrary to popular opinion, forcing people to buy insurance does nothing to reform the insurance industry). Many of the uninsured are young and healthy, and don't necessarily need insurance, even if it would be prudent to get some. Why mandate that people be prudent? Doesn't it fall on the insurance companies to convince people that they need to buy their products? Here, read
this from the WSJ:
"the nation's 47 million uninsured are not as bad a risk as is commonly assumed. Census Bureau data reveal that the uninsured are actually the kind of demographic that consumer product companies dream about. A surprising 85% of the nation's uninsured are currently employed and nearly all have worked in the past year. They are young -- almost half are between the ages of 18 and 34 -- and nearly three-quarters of the uninsured describe their health as "excellent" or "very good." More than two-thirds have at least some college education and about half earn middle-class incomes."
Of course there is a lot of political pressure to mandate that this group buys insurance, there is a lot of money to be had. I'm not convinced that it would create the health care improvements that people assume it would, however, and I would prefer to seem some actual reform of the industry that allows companies to sell to the individual more easily. This would involve major changes to the tax code that currently favor employer purchased insurance over individual insurance, a topic that is forgotten when the government mandates that everyone buy the product.
