Will Americans support the individual mandate?

An individual mandate is an important feature of many recent plans to achieve universal health insurance coverage in the United States, without radically changing the way most Americans get health care and coverage. Using national public opinion data, we find that on its own, an individual mandate does not have broad support across partisan and sociodemographic groups. Policymakers who choose to pursue an individual mandate for policy reasons may expand the base of supporters by incorporating it into a "shared-responsibility" plan that includes requirements for employers, government, and insurers.