Enforcement

Tyler Cowen says “I’m still wondering what — de facto — will be done against those poor people who are required to buy health insurance but don’t do so.” Tyler comes at this from the perspective of a bad right-winger, an opponent of universal health insurance, but I wonder, too. To me, this problem seems like a significant disadvantage of the current vogue for mandate-and-subsidize over a more traditional set-up wherein the government pays for all or some of people’s health expenses and collects taxes from people in order to do so. We already have a mechanism in place for enforcing payment of taxes.