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Delaying the "employer mandate" already means the government is giving up potential revenue next year, as businesses whose employees buy subsidized coverage on an Obamacare exchange would be fined $3,000 per person. In addition, without the reporting requirements of the employer mandate in 2014, "the exchanges and the IRS will not be able to verify whether someone's coverage is unaffordable" and thus whether the person is eligible for subsidies, said law professor Timothy Jost of Washington and Lee School of Law in Lexington, Virginia. That leaves it up to individual consumers to be honest about what they do, or do...

One of the biggest administrative hurdles facing Obamacare was the ambitious plan to verify the income and insurance status of applicants for federal health coverage subsidies. In theory, on Oct. 1 of this year, a prospective beneficiary of Obamacare was supposed to be able to visit a website like Orbitz, enter basic information, and wait as multiple state and federal government databases communicated with one another to confirm in real time the applicant’s income level, and then display the level of subsidy to which the applicant was entitled, if any. It was a level of technological sophistication unlike anything ever...

With Internal Revenue Service (IRS) controversies continuing to make headlines, the agency faces a lesser known, but critical test in the days to come. On Thursday, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma will hear the federal government’s motion to dismiss Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s legal challenge to an IRS rule aiding implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Pruitt’s lawsuit turns on whether the ACA’s subsidies for individuals to buy health insurance are

Addressing Planned Parenthood last week, President Obama made what must be one of the least self-aware statements of his tenure. "Forty years after the Supreme Court affirmed a woman's constitutional right to privacy, including the right to choose, we shouldn't have to remind people that when it comes to a woman's health, no politician should get to decide what's best for you," he said. "No insurer should get to decide what kind of care that you get. The only person who should get to make decisions about your health is you." It's no secret that

When I started this series, I wanted to systematically dismantle a myth that I’ve seen thrown in the faces of conservatives over and over. Specifically, I was inspired by a segment I caught on MSNBC, in which a panel of pundits were discussing the backlash to the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare ruling. The panel’s token conservative explained why conservatives aren’t just surrendering on ObamaCare. He highlighted a few of the policy issues with the health care reform law, pointed out its enormous cost and expansion of federal power, and began to explain why conservatives still think the law is unconstitutional. It...

For those of us who enjoy debating with leftists over the merits of ObamaCare, the most maddening argument to encounter is, “Why are you even arguing with me!? ObamaCare is a CONSERVATIVE law! The only reason you don’t like it is because President Obama proposed it, right? I bet if Bush signed it into law, you would LOVE it!” Obviously, this frustrating argument is grounded in the myth that ObamaCare is actually a conservative law. As I argued in part one of this series, liberals are wrongfully asserting that all conservatives are Republicans, and that all Republicans are conservatives, and...

One myth has been prevalent, if not pervasive, throughout the entire debate over health care reform, from President Barack Obama’s first overtures for universal coverage to this very moment. When the left is thrown on the defensive over a point of principle or policy, they almost always resort to invoking this singular myth. What’s the myth? Let me summarize it: “'ObamaCare' is a conservative health care law whose main tenet (the individual mandate) was originally created by the conservative Heritage Foundation and proposed as a bill by conservatives in 1993. Now, a conservative-appointed Chief Justice leading a conservative Supreme Court...

To uphold the Affordable Care Act, Chief Justice Roberts adopted a “saving construction” in which he deleted the “requirement” that all non-exempt Americans buy health insurance, leaving only the “penalty,” which he then recharacterized as a tax. The next day, in my Washington Examiner essay, Roberts decision didn’t open floodgates for ‘compulsion through taxation’, I contended that it was a serious misreading of the opinion to say that the individual insurance mandate had been upheld under the Tax power. Instead, the law had been rewritten to eliminate the mandate, leaving only the penalty. Some questioned the meaningfulness of this distinction....

At his third campaign event of the day, President Obama told supporters in Roanoke, Virginia those with health insurance, under ObamaCare, won't get "hit by a tax." Of course, this implies if you do not abide by the individual mandate then you will be facing a tax. "By the way, if you've got health insurance, you’re not getting hit by a tax," Obama said at a Friday night campaign rally. "The only thing that's happening to you is that you now have more security because insurance companies can't drop you when you get sick."

The point is that whether a “tax” or “penalty,” the exaction is a heavy burden on low- and middle-income Americans for a product that they may or may not want to “purchase.”

Chief Justice John Roberts rewrote the specific language of congress by claiming in his ObamaCare ruling that the penalty which the lawmakers had clearly attached to the individual mandate was actually a tax. It was the only way in which the Affordable Care Act could be saved, for the Court rejected the Commerce and Necessary and Proper clause defenses as constitutional grounds for the existence of the law. By “penciling in” the tax language necessary to satisfy his own requirement of constitutionality, Roberts behaved no differently from any liberal, activist judge so often criticized by conservatives for judicial malfeasance; that...

The Supreme Court's ruling regarding Obamacare and the individual mandate is a head-scratcher. Here's the unfettered analysis.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act did not originate in the House. The bill that did originate in the House, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, did not contain any mandate fining (or "taxing," as the will now refer to it in Washington,) for failure to have health insurance. That was Constitutionally acceptable during the period when fines for what someone has not done were still fines, and had not been converted into taxes by having the Supreme Court amend the Constitution sua sponte. But as a tax, the mandate converts the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act...

WRITTEN IN ADVANCE OF THE DECISION. ADDRESSES HISTORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE. By Michael D. Peabody - Sometime this week the United States Supreme Court will decide whether the majority of provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act are constitutional. Called Obamacare, first by detractors and then by supporters reclaiming the phrase, it promises Americans a wide variety of health care benefits. Under provisions already in place, young people can stay on their parents’ health care insurance until age 26 and small businesses can claim a tax deduction for providing health insurance to their employees. Many conservatives...

. . . I get the strong sense from a few anecdotal stories about Roberts over the past few months and the way he has written this opinion that he very, very much was concerned about keeping the Supreme Court above the partisan fray and damaging the reputation of the Court long term. . . . Second, in writing his case, Roberts forces everyone to deal with the issue as a political, not a legal issue. . . Third, while Roberts has expanded the taxation power, which I don’t really think is a massive expansion from what it was, Roberts...

The Supreme Court has allowed Obamacare's individual mandate as a TAX President Obama LIED to America when he told us that Obamacare was not a tax in any way. He then turned around and argued to the United States Supreme Court that the individual mandate and penalty for not getting healthcare was a tax and therefore constitutional. ObamaTAX via Obamacare ...... this might be JUST the right Slap in the face that America Needs to wake up and VOTE OUT OBAMA    WAKE UP AMERICA! We are not only DROWNING in Debt, but not we have seen Obama impose...

A lot of reasonable musing has been done as to whether or not Barack Obama is advantaged politically by the Supreme Court striking down or upholding ObamaCare. But it is plausible that the ultimate liberal goals for the nation are advanced the farthest by a split decision -- i.e., the much-discussed scenario where the Court strikes down only the individual mandate, while leaving the rest of the law in place. Certainly the mandate -- as drawn up in ObamaCare -- is the most blatantly unconstitutional part of the bill, and therefore it is rightfully considered the low-hanging fruit of legal...

Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the Washington Post: A recent article [“Could the health-care law work without the individual mandate?”, Mar. 28, A8] claims the IRS “will be barred from using … collection tools such as placing liens or threatening incarceration” to enforce compliance with the requirement that Americans obtain health insurance. Not so.Suppose the IRS assesses me a $1,000 penalty for failing to obtain health insurance. It is true that the law prohibits the IRS from using liens or incarceration to collect that $1,000. But, money being fungible, the IRS may simply deem...

Sebelius admits she did not consult Supreme Court decisions on religious liberty when drafting HHS mandate In this morning’s Congressional House hearing, Sebelius admits she did not consult Supreme Court decisions on religious liberty or have a legal memo prepared before she drafted the mandate. The mandate, unprecedented in American history, forces religious institutions to pay for contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortion-causing drugs, including the morning-after pill and the week-after pill, against their deeply held religious beliefs. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is the first and leading law firm to challenge this mandate–filing in four states and three circuits across...

In making the legal case against Obamacare’s individual mandate, challengers have argued that the framers of our Constitution would certainly have found such a measure to be unconstitutional. Nevermind that nothing in the text or history of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause indicates that Congress cannot mandate commercial purchases. The framers, challengers have claimed, thought a constitutional ban on purchase mandates was too “obvious” to mention. Their core basis for this claim is that purchase mandates are unprecedented, which they say would not be the case if it was understood this power existed. But there’s a major problem with this line...