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Well, one presidential primary candidate thought so, before he didn’t.

yes for sure

Since exchange subsidies are set at percent of income regardless of the actual premiums true death spiral was literally impossible. "Experts" were actively gaslighting everyone. Insane Obama team took a high risk strategy of arguing whole law should be thrown out if mandate was repealed.

I could have a whole rant here about how people are, on the whole, more risk-averse than Nash Equilibrium suggests. But I won't, because the mandate was still a better policy, and estimating the degree is so tricky that it makes NE a useful heuristic anyway.

Yes, I confess this is very much not an original thought

This was basically known from when I was on the hill in ~2010 from people at CBO. Maybe the generalists but the healthcare folks knew it was a paper tiger once it was passed and the only real value was the initial nudge.

And back to the legal side what was wild was that no lower court came anywhere close to declaring the Medicaid expansion unconstitutional! Roberts just made a thing out of it to logroll with Breyer and Kagan, and turned out that was a wayyyyy more significant policy change than ending the mandate!

Eventually, sure, but I think of it as asking for forgiveness instead of permission. Expand eligibility, let people opt in during "emergency" situations without a mandate and then put Republicans in the position of having to take it away from folks.

Yeah, it turned out adverse selection was blocked by the fact that the American medical payment system relies so much on overbilling and hoping the patient pays that a young healthy American still needs insurance as protection from overbilling.