So is it a Tax?  When Democrats this spring were hard at work
trying to get their health care reform bill passed through
Congress, they denied high and low that the penalty Americans
would be subject to under the bill’s insurance mandate was
anything like a tax.  Health care reform will force Americans to
have “minimum essential coverage” starting in 2014. “For us to
say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health
insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” said the president
last September on ABC’s This Week. But now, The New York Times
reports that his administration is defending its blatantly
unlawful mandate in court as an exercise of the government’s
“power to lay and collect taxes.”   Many states are fighting the
health care bill because they argue that the Federal Government
is overstepping its constitutional boundaries by making them
party to its assault on individual rights.  Under the
Constitution, Congress can exercise its taxing power to provide
for the “general welfare.” No doubt that