A new analysis from RAND looks at what the effect would be of eliminating the so-called “individual mandate” under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The authors use “RAND’s Comprehensive Assessment of Reform Efforts (COMPARE) microsimulation model to predict the effects of a possible Supreme Court decision invalidating the individual mandate while keeping the other parts of the law intact,” focusing on health insurance coverage overall and insurance premiums. In contrast to other estimates, the authors “estimate the premium increase that a given individual could expect with the repeal of the individual mandate. In contrast, prior models have estimated the change in average premiums, an approach that combines the change in premium per enrollee with compositional effects, such as changes in the age and tobacco use composition of the enrolled population.” The study finds that “the elimination of the individual mandate leads to a 12.5-million-person reduction in the number of newly insured individuals and increases government spending per newly insured individual by a factor of more than two. While we find that average exchange premiums increase by approximately 9.3 percent when the individual mandate is eliminated, this finding is mostly driven by compositional effects. The increase in premiums that would be faced by any given individual is only 2.4 percent.”