Cornell’s Richard Burkhauser and Kosali Simon have found that pay-or-play mandates that force employers to provide health insurance for their employees or pay a tax do little to help their target population.


The vast majority of those who benefit from pay or play mandates … live in families with incomes twice the poverty line or more and … the mandate will leave a significant share of the working poor ineligible for such benefits either because their hourly wage rate is too high or they work for smaller exempt firms.