I fear that the trio of Republican senators who killed "skinny repeal" in late July (Collins, Murkowski, McCain) are going to have a hard time rejecting the tax cut bill in the name of the individual mandate.
Skinny repeal was linked to a (somewhat uncertain) presumption that the bill would be merged in conference with the House bill, which included repeal of enhanced federal funding for the Medicaid expansion and imposition of per-capita caps on federal Medicaid spending. Defense of Medicaid was the heart and soul of the Resistance, as it should have been.
Now, we may well get a partial birth abortion of the ACA - - mandate now, massive cuts to Medicaid (including expansion repeal) later. As Andy Slavitt has warned, that splits the "23 million uninsured" baby.
The individual mandate has always been unpopular -- and frankly, after years of both self-inflicted wounds and sabotage of the ACA marketplace, it has cause to be. Health economists say that the mandate penalty was too small and too lightly enforced to be fully effective. The counterpoint is that a stricter mandate requires stronger subsidies - e.g., a cap on insurance premiums as a percent of income for all buyers, perhaps one that that matches the "affordability" threshold (currently 9.56% of income for employer-sponsored insurance and 8.05% of income for an ACA-compliant bronze plan).
For many who don't qualify for marketplace subsidies but must look to the individual market for coverage, the mandate is already effectively dead - -and so is the market. To cite just a couple of cases I've had cause to look up lately:
