To Mandate Or Not To Mandate?

Individual mandate supporters typically justify the policy by citing the problem of uncompensated care. When uninsured patients receive health services but don't pay for them, the rest of us end up footing the bill one way or another. So advocates of insurance mandates contend, plausibly enough, that we should make the free riders pay. But how big is the free-rider problem, really? According to an Urban Institute study released in 2003, uncompensated care for the uninsured constitutes less than 3 percent of all health expenditures. Even if the individual mandate works exactly as planned, that's the effective upper boundary on the mandate's impact.