1 in 5 Californians would skip on health insurance without tax penalty, survey finds

The Sacramento Bee reports:

Without the threat of a tax penalty, one in five Californians would not have signed up for health insurance this year, Harvard University researchers discovered as a part of a survey released Thursday.

One in five equates to roughly 378,000 state residents, said Dr. John Hsu, an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, and perhaps not surprisingly, many in that group were people expected to use the health care system least because of their good health.

Choice and coercion...