Individual Mandate Is Ryan Tax Credit by Other Name

March 29 (Bloomberg) -- Of all the arguments being wagedover the Affordable Care Act -- or, as the Obama campaign nowlikes to refer to it, “Obamacare” -- the one dominating theSupreme Court this week is perhaps the most conceptuallytrivial.

The individual mandate requires consumers to purchasehealth insurance in order to eliminate the problem of freeriders -- people who don’t purchase insurance until the pointwhen they get sick or injured, or never purchase insurance andend up passing the costs of care they can’t afford onto the restof us. Detractors argue that it unconstitutionally infringes onpersonal liberty by forcing Americans to purchase healthinsurance. But compare it to three ways of addressing the free-rider problem in health care that are clearly, indisputably,constitutional: