[ajross]

> There were affordable catastrophic coverage plans available

Not for anyone who needed them! If you were already sick, you would die poor without coverage. Are we really continuing to have this discussion?[1]

The market failed in this case. We all know it.

[1] Just to short circuit: you'll want to deflect to a non-economic discussion of whose "fault" it was that they were stuck with a pre-existing condition. But my point is: who cares? There was a product and a consumer which could not be exchanged at a reasonable price in an unregulated environment. And that's bad regardless of fault (doubly or triply so because it's a really important product).

[mattmcknight]

Guaranteed issue can be achieved without requiring "free" checkups. However, it can't be achieved without the individual mandate. And no one has shown any interesting in enforcing the individual mandate (despite the forced taxation approach being a much more expensive and less flexible version of the same).