I saw some points today saying how we need to be fighting back against the mandates. Being a frequent reader of DK, I never happened across info as to why mandates were really important, and so while it might have been discussed here in depth, I'm guessing there are other people like me who haven't seen it, and don't really get why mandates are important, so I'm just going to post a quick synopsis as to why I think we need to have mandates in this bill.
In short, you need mandates if you want to remove pre-existing conditions. If the insurance companies are not going to be able to discriminate based on your current health or preexisting conditions, and you DIDN'T have a mandate, the system would essentially punish the healthy people (whose premiums are going to pay for the sick people). This environment would promote people to not get insurance until they were already sick.
So if you started feeling chest pains one day while walking to the train you'd go sign up for a healthcare plan, go have your double bypass surgery, and then cancel your plan.
In an effective plan, you need healthy people to pay premiums so that the sick people can make use of those funds. If people start to only sign up when they are sick, the prices of health insurance will go way up, as only sick people will have coverage. This defeats the purpose/function of health insurance.
Like I said, I'm just trying to put out this info because I bet there are a lot of people like me who really didn't get what the point of mandates was, other than to force people to pay the ins companies money (i.e. the Dems throwing the Ins. companies a bone). There is an actual policy reason for why mandates are important if you want to avoid preexisting conditions and charging sick people a higher rate than everyone else.