One last argument for the mandate is that some will buy health insurance only when they get sick, decreasing the insurance industry's profits if they decide to carry you. A possible counter is that the firms may be free to deny your insurance application, which would incentivise getting insurance before you need it, for the sake of cost-sharing among the healthy.
This idea only works if insurance companies are prohibited from cancelling coverage when people get sick. Getting coverage before you need it is certainly prudent but it's of no value if the insurance company can just cancel you when you DO need it and AFTER you've paid premiums for years and years.
Brubricker, I'm going to disagree here; see if this is not closer to the facts:
Insurance companies are already prohibited from canceling coverage when people get sick. What really happens is that (some) people do not honestly fill out their application in the first place. Then they get sick, make a claim, and are found to have not been honest on their application; in that event they are cancelled. The key is to be honest in the first place when filling out the original application.
How do people get cancelled after paying premiums for years?
How that happens is that people stop paying their premiums. That can happen because they may not be able to pay their premiums due to that they are too ill to work, therefore become unable to pay their premiums and they are THEN cancelled.
A lot of the failure to get insurance in the first place, doesn't necessarily come from the too optimistic "certainty" that a person doesn’t need it, but also from the cynicism that the opinion like the one I'm responding to here is so rampant as to make a responsible course of action (like getting insurance when first on one's own as a young adult) seem foolish or just a waste of time and money because they are healthy and they have never experienced paying medical costs.
There seems to be a failure by both parents and the school system to teach high school students before they graduate to do some basic things to look out for themselves.
A young single man in my own state of Indiana can get a reasonable deductible health policy for $52 per month. Perhaps there should be some transition period during which a young person coming of age would have their policy separated from the family's policy, and an additional premium statement sent to the young adult in c/o the family so that a rational judgment could be made. They could then face the decision to take it up by paying the premium when it arrives, search out other more competitively priced insurance while doing so, or ignore the premium statements thereby allowing it to lapse thereby producing a cancellation. Even then follow up notices could be sent so that they could reconsider their decision for a three month grace period.
Some Health insurers indeed are crooks. I had a run-in with a company, and although they royally peed me off, I found that when I read the policy, none of which was in small print, that they were complying with the policy and I had failed in doing so. I had complicated some of my own paperwork, and was not reimbursed for all of it. If I had given that contract the same due diligence that I give every other contract that I sign, everything would’ve been different.
Complaints to state Insurance Commissioners can help to get some focus on those guys who, and there could be a Federal role in causing them to be more active in some of the states where the system is lax.
