An “individual mandate” is when individual citizens are required to have health insurance, one way or another. While proponents of such an approach laud it as universal health insurance, this is a de jure (“by law”) distinction rather than real universal coverage. History has shown that individual insurance mandates have always failed and will always fail because it is unenforceable in the real world. People simply don’t buy expensive policies or they buy and drop the policy. Additionally, the constant turnover between plans makes enforcement impossible . In the state of California, there is an “individual mandate” for all drivers to purchase auto insurance, yet 25% of drivers are uninsured according to the insurance industry. That is not universal coverage. Health insurance suffers from the same problem and hence, an “individual mandate” provides cover for politicians who want to claim “universal” coverage by mandating insurance that people can’t or won’t purchase.
