About that individual mandate

So the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) just upheld the key provision of 'Obamacare', namely the requirement that all people have health insurance. Needless to say this is good news for the president's base but those on the right fear that this decision violates their freedom to choose not to buy coverage. An economic argument in favor of the mandate was presented way back by Mankiw, Krugman, and others even before the Obama team added the provision to their own plan. I advise reading the whole 2007 NYT blog post, but here is an excerpt,

"...the point of a mandate isn’t to dictate how people should live their lives — it’s to prevent some people from gaming the system. Under the Obama plan [before the individual mandate was added], healthy people could choose not to buy insurance, then sign up for it if they developed health problems later. This would lead to higher premiums for everyone else. It would reward the irresponsible, while punishing those who did the right thing and bought insurance while they were healthy."_Paul Krugman, December, 2007 (Italics mine).