It doesn't matter if they call it a tax or a penalty
by David Atkins
The last few days have seen Mitt Romney argue with himself, to much general hilarity, over whether to call the Affordable Care Act's mandate provision a "penalty" or a "tax." The larger conservative establishment would obviously love to call it a tax, since John Roberts gave the mandate his grand seal of Constitutional approval by declaring it to fall within Congress' powers of taxation. Mitt Romney has trouble with that, since he himself called the mandate a "penalty" when he instituted a healthcare mandate in Massachusetts. So the Republicans are doing backflips trying to find their rhetorical footing on the subject and failing amusingly.
But on a larger level it doesn't even matter what they call it because people who know anything about the issue at all already understand the basics pretty well, and people who don't understand the issue at all after the last two years aren't likely to be persuadable because of what a politician says about it now.
It's fairly obvious what the mandate does: once the government makes health insurance affordable (in theory), people who don't pay for it will be penalized in order to prevent moral hazard, and to prevent people from not buying insurance until the minute they feel they might have a medical problem. Call it a tax, call it a penalty, call it whatever one wants: the concept is clear enough.
That doesn't make it popular, of course. Conservatives hate it because it gives government another power over what people do with their money, and because it means that human suffering won't be as wholly dependent on how much money people happen to have--and as we all know, punishing people with misery and death for daring to not have enough money is a core moral principle for conservatives. Progressives tend to hate the mandate because it entails the government forcing people to buy insurance from bloodsucking private corporations that cannot and will not provide care or coverage as inexpensively or as effectively as a single-payer system could.
But both camps are fairly clear about the basics, as will anyone be who looks at the issue for more than 10 seconds.
So the Republicans can spin their wheels trying to frame the mandate as a tax in spite of having nominated the grand architect of the original private healthcare mandate system. It won't work. People understand that taxes are levied on purchases. Fines are levied on people who don't do what the government says they must, including making appropriate purchases. Calling the mandate a "tax" doesn't actually make much sense, given how most people understand the concept of taxation.
But more importantly, the larger voting public generally understands what the mandate is. What Republicans call it won't make much of a difference.
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