I live in California and here we were one of the first to mandate car insurance. Do you know what happens when the insurance companies know you have to buy their product and can not, in fact legally drive without it? They raise their prices...significantly.
It turns out that mandating car insurance did not increase the number of insured drivers in California, but it did change who was insured. Poor people just drive illegally.
Every heathcare expert I have seen thinks there is a huge difference between Hillary's and Obama's plan.
One of the biggest differences is that the very poor and the unemplooyed will pay NOTHING under Hillary and they will receive COMPREHENSIVE coverage.
Almost EVERYONE will pay less under Hillary than under Obama.
Obama's plan recently changed. (with the ban on pricing insurance by risk) If he does that, without ALSO having a mandate (to reduce the unit cost) there will be an outcry because that heathcare per person will probably be substantially more expensive than healthcare is now.
Again, this text below is a good explanation of why. Insurance companies are NOT welfare agencies. They can't operate at a loss. Someone has to make up that difference.
Read this carefully, its very important:
http://www.economist.com/research/Econom ics/alphabetic.cfm?LETTER=A
Adverse selection
When you do business with people you would be better off avoiding. This is one of two main sorts of market failure often associated with insurance. The other is moral hazard.
Adverse selection can be a problem when there is asymmetric information between the seller of insurance and the buyer; in particular, insurance will often not be profitable when buyers have better information about their risk of claiming than does the seller. Ideally, insurance premiums should be set according to the risk of a randomly selected person in the insured slice of the population (55-year-old male smokers, say). In practice, this means the average risk of that group. When there is adverse selection, people who know they have a higher risk of claiming than the average of the group will buy the insurance, whereas those who have a below-average risk may decide it is too expensive to be worth buying. In this case, premiums set according to the average risk will not be sufficient to cover the claims that eventually arise, because among the people who have bought the policy more will have above-average risk than below-average risk.
Putting up the premium will not solve this problem, for as the premium rises the insurance policy will become unattractive to more of the people who know they have a lower risk of claiming.
One way to reduce adverse selection is to make the purchase of insurance compulsory, so that those for whom insurance priced for average risk is unattractive are not able to opt out.
