Why Would We Want an Employer Mandate?
Right now companies provide insurance for employees if they have to attract and retain a certain skill / education level. Federal law AND the insurance companies typically require them to offer the plans to insure that there is no discrimination and that the insured pool at the company is a minimum of 75% of the employee base.
Effectively, total payroll is artificially lowered by about $12K per employee. If that insurance requirement went away some employees would see their salaries rise by that $12k or possibly more, others would see them rise by less or nothing. It's that second group that you have to cover by subsidy. The amount of change in paycheck would depend on the price elasticity of supply of the particular type of labor on offer (database administrator vs litigator vs risk management specialist vs call center worker) which depends on the supply of that kind of labor. For example, assume that there is a not a great excess of database administrators. Firms will bid up the price (salary) back to the original price (salary plus health insurance). If there is a glut, for example call center workers, firms might choose to hire more call center workers (as long as there are workers who will work for the salary without the health insurance).
So we need an employer mandate to insure the people who are currently insured even though in a sense, they are only insured because the firm wants to offer insurance to harder to get employees. Unfortunately, this misses out on one of the bigger benefits of losing employer funded insurance - the lower cost to hire an employee and higher employment, lower costs for businesses.
By the way, you know how you know that individual insurance sucks worse than group insurance? Because firms absorb the administrative cost of the programs as well as paying part of the premium instead of just paying people the extra money.
Why Would We Want an Individual Mandate?
The vibrant contract employee market is probably where you see the hypothetical healthy, uninsured 24 year-old (and I'd really like to see some numbers on that by the way). This hypothetical 24-year-old is doing 2 things: 1. taking a risk which society will have to at least partially fund if something catastrophic happens and 2. not paying into the financing component of health care by essentially not saving for the health care that he/she will eventually need as a matter of course. They can get away with this because 1. catastrophic risks are relatively rare and 2. if they eventually get into a large group plan all sins are forgiven.
Subsidies
So on one hand you've got people who can't afford insurance and would be dropped if an employer could get away with it and on the other some indeterminate number of people who don't want insurance because they think they can get away with it even if they are imposing some costs on the rest of us.
So, let's look at the subsidy level. If you go to 300% of the poverty level you get to about $66k. Now, if that's a household figure that means you're potentially looking at someone with an income of $45K and another earner making up the additional $22k. My guess is that both would fall into the bucket of people who are not in high demand. So if they fall under the individual mandate (because the employer mandate doesn't apply), they're looking at spending 18% of their income on health insurance. If they fall under the employer mandate, they're high cost employees.
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