There are no contortions involved. There is no law that mandates you purchase health insurance. What there is, is a question on your tax form asking whether you have health insurance, and a reduction of your taxes if your answer is yes. It's no different than not earning the Earned Income Credit, or many other tax provisions and is clearly a tax.
The contortions came from people who wanted to pretend it wasn't a tax because they didn't want to be seen as raising taxes. So they lied.
"THIS IS WHAT DESTROYED OBAMACARE OVER THE PAST 4 YEARS."
Obamacare is still in effect. The mandates may be gone, but there are a lot of rules and regulations in Obamacare that negatively impact health care in this country, and will be operative until there's a full repeal.
Of course everyone on the left lied. And guess what, lying is not a crime when you’re a politician.
Look, all I was trying to do is show that Roberts was neither rolled nor bribed on his Obamacare vote. He followed a very clever strategem that actually, mostly worked. I didn’t endorse it, although I respect it because it was good. I wanted Obamacare overturned like everyone else.
If you want to blame anyone for a single vote that would have stopped Obamacare, blame John McCain. His motives were not pure by any stretch back in 2017.
And from a top level perspective, here we are, 9 years after Obamacare, 7 years after the SCOTUS decision, and 2 years after the GOP’s failure to overturn it when they had the Congress, and what is making the news? Medicare for all. The fact that this monstrosity doesn’t have a stake in it is due to silly and stupid citizens, the lockhold that the left has on public education, and a media that is most comfortable, in the presence of Democrats, lying on its back with its legs spread.
Does anyone think that had Obamacare been overturned, lock stock and barrel, back in 2012 that Medicare for all would be a dead issue? Hardly. So the beast was wounded, not killed. But the same deceptive forces that made Obamacare happen are still around, still alive, still getting attention.
That’s why this ridiculous blame game focused on Roberts is dumb, dumnber, and dumbest. Medicare for all is worse than Obamacare, yet it has legs. Focus on the real problems.
I would not want anyone still angry about Obamacare on my team. I want the ones who only look to the future battles, not the past ones.