Last month I wrote about Plan B or finding an alternative to the individual mandate for health insurance . Several have been proposed but I’d like to point out a recent NY Times opinion piece by Ross Douthat which says in part:

The mandate is a harder puzzle, since it works in tandem with the requirement — popular enough to have many Republican supporters — that insurers cease denying coverage to customers with pre-existing conditions. If you repealed the mandate without repealing that requirement, people could simply wait until they were sick to buy insurance, driving everyone’s prices up.

But Republicans could propose dealing with the same problem in a less coercive way. One alternative would establish limited enrollment periods (every two years, for instance) when people with pre-existing conditions could buy into the new exchanges without being denied coverage. Anyone who failed to take advantage wouldn’t be able to get coverage for a pre-existing condition until the next enrollment period arrived. This would reduce the incentive to game the system, without directly penalizing Americans who decline to buy insurance.

Several other ideas for conservative reforms of the health care reform known as ObamaCare are discussed and the article is worth reading but this seemed directly relevant to my thoughts on finding alternatives to the individual mandate for health insurance.