GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney attempted to clarify his campaign’s position on the individual mandate, calling the provision a “tax,” days after his top adviser said otherwise.
“The Supreme Court has spoken and while I agreed with the dissent, that’s taken over by the fact that the majority of the court said that it’s a tax and therefore it is a tax,” said Romney in an interview to air Wednesday on “CBS This Evening.”
Romney’s comments followed criticism from Republican leaders after his adviser Eric Fehrnstrom called the individual mandate a penalty during an interview Monday.
Fehrnstrom’s remark conflicted with the emerging GOP attempt to characterize the mandate, which was upheld along with much of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, by the Supreme Court last week, as part of a tax increase from the president.
Republicans rallied around that argument after Chief Justice Roberts, in the court’s landmark ruling, found the healthcare mandate constitutional, stemming from Congress’s taxing powers.
The ruling however has placed the Romney campaign in a difficult situation as the mandate is similar to healthcare reforms he instituted as Massachusetts governor. While Romney says that he never intended for Massachusetts’s reforms to be implemented nationally, the Obama campaign has hit him on the issue suggesting his policies were the blueprint for Democrats’ own healthcare law.
In his CBS interview, Romney stressed that he agreed with the dissent’s opinion that the law was not a tax, but that his views were overruled by the court’s majority opinion.
“Well, I said that I agreed with the dissent,” said Romney, “and the dissent made it very clear that they thought it was unconstitutional, but the dissent lost, it’s in the minority.
“So, now, they have spoken,” he added, “There’s no way around that. You can try and say you wish they’d decided a different way, but they didn’t.”
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11 Responses
This is exactly right. It’s a tax because the Court said so, and 0bama has to accept that it’s a tax because otherwise it’s unconstitutional. And that’s why Romneycare in Massachusetts is not a problem: Congress has only the powers the constitution specifically grants it, and making people buy things isn’t one of them. But states are not limited to a list of powers; they can make pretty much any kind of law they like, and while Romneycare may have been a bad law, and the D-controlled MA legislature may have messed it up almost beyond recognition, it it within the state’s constitutional powers.
Why is that a contradiction?
If you listen to his advisor all he says is that Romney Thinks its a penalty. But the Metzius is that its a tax. Poshut.
Its like saying you think this is choclate ice cream. And you can think that all you want but the metzius is that it is coffee ice cream.
Unofficially, it is really a penalty. However, I am guessing that it is collected via the tax office. That is, a page will probably be added to the tax form that will require you to declare your health insurance and provide proof. If you do not have health coverage, your taxes will be adjusted accordingly.
Call it what you like. But since Romney instituted a similar mandate, including the “penalty/tax”, in Massachusetts, he cannot attack Obamacare. Period.
For voters this is not a constitutional issue, it is a health coverage issue.
Romney’s other stipulation, that his state health care reforms were not intended for national implementation, has no validity either. If it succeeded why shouldn’t it be done for the whole country. If it didn’t, Governor Mitt Romney should be held responsible.
#3, you don’t have to guess. Being collected by the IRS is one factor, but only a small one. Much more important is the fact that it’s perfectly legal for you to choose to pay the money and not get insurance; if it was a penalty then you wouldn’t have that choice, any more than you may choose to speed and pay the fine. Also, the fee applies even if you didn’t know about it, or you thought you had acceptable insurance; normally a penalty requires knowingly violating the law. And this fee is levied as 2.5% of taxable income, with a floor and a ceiling; that makes it similar to the Social Security tax, which is a tax on incomes, not a penalty. Another factor is that the amount isn’t exorbitant, and many people will find it cheaper than buying insurance.
But the main factor is simply that if it’s not a tax then it’s unconstitutional, because Congress has no power to force people to engage in economic activity if they don’t want to.
#4, you are neither sane nor conservative, and using that name shows that you are not honest either. States are not limited to enumerated powers; Congress is. It really is as simple as that. In Massachusetts Romneycare was a bad idea, and the Democrat legislature changed it so much that it turned it into a fiasco, but it was legal. On the federal level the same thing is illegal; does that not mean anything to you? The only way the Supreme Court found to make it legal was to call it a tax, which means that 0bama and the Democrats are responsible for a huge tax increase, and all their promises not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250K were lies.
This is to me a moral issue of enormous proportions.
To paraphrase a statement I heard on the radio last week, spoken by a physician who is an officer with some medical organization or another, it speaks so poorly for us as a nation that we don’t take care of our own, especially because we are the only modern nation in the entire world that doesn’t.
All the ideological ranting about tax, not a tax, government takeover, etc, just allows conservatives to obscure the moral issue behind veils of so-called principle. To me, this is no different morally than the so-called principled arguments of a confirmed Socialist that avoid and obscure the violations of human rights carried out under Communist regimes.
Yes, YonasonW, it is indeed a moral issue. It is immoral to forcibly take money from one person for the benefit of another. That is called robbery, and it makes no difference whether the person saying “your money or your life” wears a bandanna or a uniform.
Call it a banana. It really doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is it will do what Romney wanted the identical charge, fee, tax penalty or banana to do when he was Governor of Massachusetts…namely to provide an incentive for people to buy insurance and not try to stick their medical bills to the taxpayers when they had some major medical need and show up at the emergency room without coverage.
Yes, yes Milhouse..unless you want to pay taxes it’s robbery to levy taxes to pay for government services. Dumkopf
It’s robbery to take money from one person for the benefit of another.