The New Republic Columnist Johnathan Cohn wrote about the presidential candidates' health care proposals, and explored a point made by Health Policy Director Len Nichols--individual mandate is necessary for achieving universal health coverage. An excerpt from Cohn's Column is below:

The logic of a mandate begins with understanding exactly why Obama's essential diagnosis of the problem--that it's all about affordability--is wrong. It's certainly true that cost is the single biggest reason 45 million Americans don't have health insurance today. That is why all three Democrats have proposed adopting the same set of strategies to make insurance more affordable: Requiring insurers to sell to everybody, at the same price, regardless of medical condition; creating a public program into which anybody can enroll; cutting down on wasteful treatments that drive up the price of medicine unnecessarily; and offering financial assistance to those people who might still need help paying for coverage. Make those changes--in other words, make insurance affordable--and most of the uninsured will leap at the chance to get coverage. ...

It's not the theory of mandates so much as the practice of them that worries other critics. This is usually the place where car insurance enters the discussion. Most states require that drivers carry liability insurance. But, in some states, more than a third of all drivers don't have coverage. (If you've ever had an accident with an uninsured motorist, you've learned this the hard way.) If Americans aren't complying with requirements to buy car insurance, the argument goes, why would they comply requirements to buy health insurance? ...

According to Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, it's impossible to peg the likely impact of a mandate with even the very rough degree of precision he and other economists use for other estimates, simply because it requires making even more assumptions. But he also stressed that the question isn't whether a mandate will make a difference--it's how much of a difference and how close to full, 100 percent coverage an individual mandate system would get. Nor is Gruber alone in this assessment: It's pretty much conventional wisdom among policy makers. Just yesterday, the Wharton School's Mark Pauly--another highly regarded health economist, but one who tends to embrace more conservative views--co-signed a letter with Gruber and the New America Foundation's Len Nichols affirming that an individual mandate is essential for achieving universal coverage. ...

The complete The New Republic article can be found here. For additional reading on individual mandates, check out “Health Debate Reality Check: The Role of Individual Requirements,” a policy brief explaining the value of an individual mandate when seeking a system of coverage for all Americans. Also, in a teleconference last week, the brief's authors--Mark Pauly of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., and Len Nichols, Director of the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation--discussed their reasons for supporting an individual requirement to purchase health insurance, and answered questions about the feasibility of enforcing a mandate.