"Yes, I'd bring back the individual mandate," says the 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, contending it would be popular now, "compared to what's being offered."
It’s sort of a good case study in how capitalist markets inherently can’t deliver what people need. The reform model Democrats have embraced is the highly regulated oligopolistic market model, but this is a bureaucratic shambles that leaves out tens of millions of people anyways and is incredibly complex and delicate and therefore vulnerable to political sabotage by their enemies.
In order to defend the mandate (therefore the approach of the ACA as a whole) you have to have a catastrophic lack of imagination, though. You have to actually think nothing better is possible. And Democrats wonder why people don’t like Joe Biden.
I’ve had to pay this penalty multiple times (before it got suspended), as a lot of people did who don’t have insurance. Its basically a big fuck you to poor people requiring them to give money to insurance companies who do nothing but prevent health care.
Arguably the mandate is actually necessary to make the ACA work. Here’s a historical breakdown of how a very similar regulatory configuration to the current version of the ACA (ACA plus some changes by Trump) wound up basically destroying the health insurance market in WA in the 90’s over the course of about six years: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/health-reform-without-a-mandate-lessons-from-washington-state/2012/06/16/gJQAosKghV_blog.html
It’s sort of a good case study in how capitalist markets inherently can’t deliver what people need. The reform model Democrats have embraced is the highly regulated oligopolistic market model, but this is a bureaucratic shambles that leaves out tens of millions of people anyways and is incredibly complex and delicate and therefore vulnerable to political sabotage by their enemies.
In order to defend the mandate (therefore the approach of the ACA as a whole) you have to have a catastrophic lack of imagination, though. You have to actually think nothing better is possible. And Democrats wonder why people don’t like Joe Biden.
I’ve had to pay this penalty multiple times (before it got suspended), as a lot of people did who don’t have insurance. Its basically a big fuck you to poor people requiring them to give money to insurance companies who do nothing but prevent health care.
Yeah, the ACA is an anti poor neoliberal clusterfuck. I don’t mean to defend the mandate rather point out how awful the overall approach is.