Gov. Mitt Romney wants to require the purchase of health insurance by anyone who can afford it. I think that’s a bad idea.

First of all, the problem he’s addressing doesn’t seem to be a major factor in pushing health-care costs up. Greg Scandlen of the Galen Institute writes: “There may remain some free-riders who refuse to pay their fair share, and remain uninsured, confident that society will take care of their needs eventually. But, so what? Even today with 41 million uninsured, the cost of uncompensated care is a mere 3.5% of total health spending. This is a trivial amount by any standard. Certainly far less than the average department store loses to shoplifting.” He adds that if we adopted certain other reforms to reduce the number of people without insurance, those losses would decline further.

Second, the analogy the governor makes to mandated car insurance doesn’t hold up. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute puts it this way: “First, mandated auto insurance leaves you free to take the bus. You can’t exactly decline to own your body. Second, mandated auto insurance is supposed to insure that victims are made whole after they are hit by a tortfeasor”–which germs aren’t. “Yes, government has decided to pay for health care for those who do not obtain their own means of financing it. But that is a conscious choice–government hardly qualifies as a victim when people take it up on this offer.”

Third, if you’re going to mandate health insurance, you’ve got to define what counts as health insurance. Every provider group will be lobbying for inclusion in the government’s definition of a standard benefits package. (I don’t think that libertarian Ronald Bailey has given adequate attention to this point in endorsing mandates.) And it will be hard to resist demands for price controls over a product that you are required to purchase. So we are talking about a reasonably direct path to a much greater expansion of governmental involvement in health care than Romney advertises or may even have in mind.

Finally, we should face the fact that health insurance is not an attractive deal for many young, healthy people. Getting rid of some mandates–for example, the state-level mandates that make it harder for people to buy a cheaper catastrophic policy–to make it a better deal for them would make more sense than forcing them to buy a product they don’t want.