Of course minus the mandate, there is nothing there except massive unintended consequences (which the bill was already full of).
The whole point of forcing people to buy is to increase the pool of payees that are unlikely to use care (young adults—a patient population that is very well served with nothing but inexpensive catastrophic care coverage for trauma).
No mandate, plus dumb things like no denial or even raised rates for preexisting conditions means bankruptcy for insurance. Insurance margins (health insurance, anyway, I think they do well on life insurance) are actually not high. Total insurance profit is 1-2% of total healthcare cost, and ~50% of the total is not "insured, so that makes insurance profit 2-4%. With no mandate, they don't have loads of healthy people forced to pay premiums, but they still have to insure very bad risks at the same rate as the healthy. That's like charging someone the exact same premium for a Smart Car as a Bugatti Veyron.
The mandate was always a really bad idea. It wasn't just dems in favor of mandates, BTW, even though they own this entire bill. Some R plans that never left committee also had mandates as I recall. It's terrible law, IMO. The government could by the same precedent require people to buy X pounds of veggies per week, for example. No difference at all.
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