But others believe that the mandate does more harm than good. According to an analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, eliminating the mandate would:

Increase the number of uninsured by about 16 million people, resulting in an estimated 39 million uninsured Americans by 2019.
Increase premiums for new non-group policies by 15 to 20 percent relative to the current law.
Reduce the number of Americans with employer sponsored insurance coverage by 4 million to 5 million.
Reduce the number of Americans with individual coverage by 5 million.
Reduce the number of people on Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program by 6 million to 7 million people.
Create higher health spending, on average, for Medicaid enrollees than under the current law.

One of the best ways to see what the individual mandate might cost is to look at an existing model — Massachusetts. Before universal health care was established in Massachusetts, the state had the highet per capita health care costs for any part of the country (except Washington D.C.). After individual mandates were put into place, costs continued to skyrocket. Premiums in the state became higher than anywhere else in the country, and Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at the Harvard Business School and former editor-in-chief at the New England Journal of Medicine, said requiring people to buy insurance at whatever price the companies choose to charge became a windfall for the insurance companies.

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The individual mandate cheatsheet

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