What’s the purpose or rationale of an employer mandate or an employer responsibility provision?
In today’s market, most health insurance coverage is provided by employers. Rather than create the upheaval that would accompany abandoning this model, Congress chose to ‘maintain and, where possible, build upon the nation’s employer-employee system of health insurance. Employers, particularly larger employers, are able to negotiate better prices and spread risks more broadly than individuals. Thus, the employer mandate is another mechanism that can create pressure to keep health care costs as low as possible. The mandate is also a means of ensuring that employers that offer employee coverage currently do not “dump” their employees into the Exchange, or if they do, that the additional cost imposed on the federal government is repaid.
