Health Care BS

If you want to know why the major bird cage liners are begging for government subsidies to stop their slide into bankruptcy, this piece in the NYT pretty much tells the tale:

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s ‘power to lay and collect taxes.’

What crack reporting! Only a month behind the curve! I (and many others) blogged about this long ago. Predictably, the NYT passes lightly over the most newsworthy facet of the story:

While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.

Obama did indeed insist that the mandate was “absolutely not a tax.” Here’s a video of his now-inconvenient exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the tax question:

The reason the DOJ has been forced to contradict Obama so openly is that Congress justified its authority to enact the mandate on the grounds that it is a regulation of commerce.

But as it became more and more obvious that this argument won’t pass the laugh test in the Supreme Court, the DOJ is falling back on Congress’s power to tax. That ain’t gonna fly either.