Any serious national health care reform effort must force individuals to have coverage, industry experts said at a recent panel discussion.

Patrick R. Young

“We need an individual coverage mandate,” said Patrick R. Young, president of small group and middle markets for Aetna’s mid-Atlantic region, which includes Southern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia.

Young called an individual insurance mandate and changing the tax laws to permit individuals to write off their insurance costs “simple steps” to help cut the number of uninsured people in the U.S. Those steps, he added, would have “a dramatic effect” on lessening the number of uninsured in the U.S., which is about 45.5 million people, especially among the estimated 11 million Americans who can, but don’t enroll.

Young and the other 11 panelists, ranging from New Jersey politicians to doctors, carrier CEOs to think-tank representatives, agreed that individual mandates for coverage are essential to improving health coverage in the U.S. and a key move toward universal health care. The two-hour panel discussion was held before about 400 agents and brokers at a state of health care forum in Trenton, N.J., sponsored by the New Jersey Association of Health Underwriters.

The panel said national health reform, including possibly universal health coverage, is more likely with President Barack Obama than would have been possible with Sen. John McCain, but that it will cost money that Congress right now will struggle to find.

“We can get to universal health care, but not without a tremendous fight,” said Steven M. Goldman, New Jersey’s insurance commissioner. “It’s complicated enormously by Washington and a host of other things, including our economic climate.”

This story originally appeared in the April 2009 print edition of Insurance & Financial Advisor.