David Catron at Health Care BS quotes Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz on whether ObamaCare authorizes government to require citizens to buy health insurance:
We actually have not required in this law that you carry health insurance … What we’re doing is that you will be in a different tax status if you carry insurance versus not carrying health insurance …
She compares this to the tax deduction for owning a home – as if it’s that OK. Watch the video for the whole quote. It appears that Wasserman turned the tables on the questioner. But not so fast.
Catron makes the point that the IRS will confiscate or reduce your tax refund for not complying. That sounds like mandatory insurance to me.
As for the home interest tax deduction analogy, why not take that on? There’s a difference between (1) a tax exemption on money used to purchase a product and (2) a tax penalty for not making a purchase at all.
And don’t forget the larger picture: Why can government not tax you on interest you pay when borrowing money for a home, but not other items? This is social engineering: using tax policy to control your behavior. As Yaron Brook has written:
Government’s job is not to dictate your values but to protect them. In a free country, you choose values and then use your own money as a tool to achieve them. But a value-rigged tax policy reverses this cause and effect–it uses your money against you, bribing you with tax breaks that let you keep some of your earnings in exchange for abandoning your preferred values.
Read the whole article, it’s great.
Wasserman was answering a question of where the U.S. Constitution authorizes you to buy insurance. Perhaps a better way to ask is where the politicians get the authority to require citizens to buy insurance that politicians approve of, or dictate how we may and may not pay for medical care. When insurance is mandatory, politicians get to decide what legal insurance is, and your current insurance can become illegal.
Or more fundamentally, ask what gives anyone the authority to force you to pay for other people’s medical care or insurance. This is what mandatory insurance and so-called health care “reform” is all about anyway. Don’t get hung up on details. Don’t forget, mandatory insurance is a tax.
