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Beyond Payment and Delivery Reform: The Individual Mandate's Cost-Control Potential

In a symposium focused on healthcare cost control, most of our authors have unsurprisingly highlighted and assessed Obamacare’s payment and delivery reforms—the supply-side efforts to decrease costs of medical treatment. But there is another party in healthcare decision-making who is equally or even more important: the patient. The question we will tackle here is whether the individual mandate and its accompanying patient-centered insurance reforms might decrease costs for patients in ways that ought to matter in assessing Obamacare’s cost control provisions. The individual mandate’s cost control potential lies in its reduction or even elimination of patients’ decision costs. The mandate, together with its minimum coverage requirements and a handful of the statute’s substantive insurance reforms, combats demand-side inefficiencies that might arise from patients’ bounded rationality. Decisions about whether to buy commercial insurance, how much insurance to buy, whether to consume preventive care, and how much to pay for that care are all difficult decisions. In order to make optimal choices, patients need a lot of information that is costly to obtain and to evaluate.