Jonathan Cohn reviews, somewhat negatively, one proposal:
Under the Affordable Care Act, people with the economic means to pay for health care must obtain insurance or pay a modest fee to the government. (The government subsidizes the purchase for people who can’t afford the full price of a policy; it also exempts people with religious objections to formalized medical care.) Paul [Starr] suggests that, instead of imposing this requirement, the government could simply have offered everybody a choice: People could opt to refuse insurance, but only if they were willing to relinquish the benefits and protections of the new law for a fixed period of time: For example, they would not be guaranteed coverage if they had pre-existing conditions. (An alternative would be to charge people late-enrollment fees.) … It’s true that soft mandates work for the Medicare population. But does that lesson apply to the population that the Affordable Care Act's mandate targets? There's good reason to doubt it.
The Dish 