When the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010, one of the most controversial parts was the individual mandate. A person who does not buy health insurance is charged a penalty at tax time. Proponents of the law held their collective breath as the Supreme Court mulled whether to strike down the individual mandate.
It did not, but in 2015, one year after ACA took full effect, Senate Democrats want to extend the individual mandate enrollment period to give the uninsured another chance to avoid costly penalties.
Perhaps the individual mandate was not as essential as people thought. The penalty was meant to force young healthy people to buy health insurance coverage. The reason to force them was to make sure that insurers had a good pool of people who paid premiums but did not use a lot of medical care. If everyone who bought coverage was old and sick, the reasoning went, insurers would go broke. That would have been the Obamacare death spiral.
In the first open enrollment, about 8 million people signed up, more than had been expected. Young and healthy people did buy insurance. Perhaps the idea of protecting themselves from unexpected medical bills was motivation enough.
