The Effect of the Affordable Care Act on Enrollment and Premiums, With and Without the Individual Mandate.

This article describes the results of an analysis using RAND's COMPARE (Comprehensive Assessment of Reform Efforts) microsimulation model to predict the effects of a possible Supreme Court decision invalidating the individual mandate provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 while keeping the other parts of the law intact. The authors predict the effects of such a decision on health insurance coverage overall and for subgroups based on income. They also estimate where people will obtain insurance in scenarios with and without the mandate and how the elimination of the individual mandate will affect insurance premiums. The analysis predicted that, if the individual mandate were to be eliminated: (1) 12.5 million people who would have otherwise signed up for coverage will be uninsured. (2) Premium prices in the non-group market will increase by 2.4 percent. (3) Total government spending will increase modestly, from $394 billion to $404 billion in 2016. (4) The amount of government spending per newly insured individual will more than double, from $3,659 to $7,468. The study estimates a smaller effect on premiums than comparable studies because the RAND team uses a method that accounts for the difference in the age composition of enrollees with and without the mandate.