Require Individuals to Obtain Coverage
View Online
Access the tool
The RAND Corporation's COMPARE Initiative provides information and tools to help policymakers, the media, and other interested parties understand, design, and evaluate health policies. The COMPARE website presents a range of policy options that allows the user to explore the effects of commonly proposed health care reforms.
This document explores how requiring individuals to obtain health insurance (an individual mandate) would affect health system performance along nine dimensions. An individual mandate would increase the number of people with coverage by 9 to 34 million, depending on the policy's design. Newly insured individuals would have improved patient experience and increased life expectancy. There is little evidence about how an individual mandate would affect waste; it would have no effect on spending, consumer financial risk, the reliability of receiving recommended care, or system capacity. Implementing an individual mandate would be challenging because it is difficult to determine compliance and enforce penalties for noncompliance.
The research described in this report was performed under the auspices of RAND Health.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation Technical report series. RAND technical reports may include research findings on a specific topic that is limited in scope or intended for a narrow audience; present discussions of the methodology employed in research; provide literature reviews, survey instruments, modeling exercises, guidelines for practitioners and research professionals, and supporting documentation; or deliver preliminary findings. All RAND reports undergo rigorous peer review to ensure that they meet high standards for research quality and objectivity.
This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited; linking directly to this product page is encouraged. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial purposes. For information on reprint and reuse permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.