The other day Simon Lazurus wrote an elaborately detailed explanation of why Paul Ryan's Roadmap and the current GOP budget employ individual mandates that are hard to distinguish from the one in the dreaded Affordable Care Act. There turns out to be an even easier way to establish this point -- just ask Ryan:
Q: If Medicare becomes a voucher program, would you require seniors to purchase private insurance and if so isn’t that an individual mandate? If you will not require them to purchase insurance how do you propose to prevent a situation where the costs of uninsured seniors is very expensive and gets passed on to me as a private policy holder? [...]
RYAN: Its mandate works no different than how the current Medicare law works today, which is you just select from a wide range of different plans.
Of course, the conservative argument is that the individual mandate is a new step until a frightening and unprecedented realm of unlimited government power. It's a philosophically and legally ludicrous argument, and the fact that Ryan casually employed the same mechanism twice is yet another demonstration of that fact.