Against mandates

John Schwenkler elaborates (bold mine):

...in a politically uncorrupted world, none of this would be an issue: health insurance is a public good, and as such it makes a good deal of sense to require individuals to buy in to the risk pool from which they’re ultimately going to benefit. In practice, though, mandates mean a lot more than this; they’re not just about the requirement to purchase some health insurance, but rather to buy at least a particular amount of it, and that amount is determined by the very same politicians whose commitment to the agenda of the health care lobby opponents of “free market” systems generally decry. This does not have the effect of making health care cheaper, since it eliminates the possibility of offering low-cost plans that incentivize good health and individual responsibility, and instead pushes citizens into exactly the sorts of plans that encourage unnecessary consumption of health care and thereby keep prices unnaturally high. As I’ve said before, short of government rationing (which of course is subject to regulatory capture in its own right) the most natural way to make health care more affordable is to make less of it free, which is exactly the opposite of what a system of strict mandates is going to tend to do.