Decline of employer-based health insurance

This is why we need the Affordable Care Act - disparaged as `Obama Care'.  The Republican debate leaves you feeling tyrannized "they are going to make me buy insurance".  The real problem is people can't afford insurance. Leading the charge are employers who say they can't afford to insure employees.  Nor can the employed!   Once we bar denying insurance due to pre-existing conditions you have to find the revenue to enable the insurers to pay for the influx of sicker people!  There are two solutions: subsidies for the low income, and mandatory purchase for others. The much-slammed individual mandate is a penalty for failure to buy insurance - a way to solve the free-rider problem. - GWC 
h/t Krugman/NY Times

Health reform: individual mandate necessary

When the Romney health insurance plan in Massachusetts kicked in - when people who were eligible for subsidies were compelled to buy health insurance there was a huge increase in the number of insured health people. So what? That is what makes insurance possible. Healthy people must pay into the system. If you could sign up for insurance the day you got your cancer diagnosis few would buy insurance. You would buy it when you needed it - like `just in time' manufacturing planning.

That's why if you repeal the individual mandate the entire Affordable Care Act collapses.

More mandate-relevant evidence | The Incidental Economist