Republican candidate for President, Mitt Romney, now says that the individual mandate requirement is a tax. However, he has previously stated that the exact same thing, when enacted in Massachusetts, was a penalty. Is it a tax, or isn’t it?
According to the Supreme Court, the individual mandate is a tax. The individual mandate is the most controversial part of the Affordable Care Act. In short, it requires Americans to have health insurance coverage is 2014. Those who cannot afford coverage will receive a credit in order to be able to buy health insurance. Those who choose not to buy health insurance coverage will be required to pay a tax. The Supreme Court says that this is constitutional because it is a form of taxation.
Eric Fehrnstrom is an aide to Mitt Romney. Fehrnstrom was on MSNBC when he said that Mitt Romney doesn’t believe that the individual mandate is a tax. Fehrnstrom said:
“The governor believes that what we put in place in Massachusetts was a penalty and he disagrees with the court’s ruling that the mandate was a tax”.
In a video, Ferhnstrom says that Mitt Romney was calling the exact same thing a “penalty” when he was doing it in Massachusetts. The same video shows a clip from 2008 where Mitt Romney says, during a debate, that using a tax penalty discourages “free riders”. The same video also has a quote from Mitt Romney from 2009 where Romney said:
“Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages “Free Riders” to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others. This doesn’t cost the government a single dollar.”
Clearly, Mitt Romney has said, in the past, that this is a tax. However, now, he has a different opinion about it. He told CBS News:
“The majority of the court said it’s a tax and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There is no way around that. You can try and say you wish they had decided a different way but they didn’t. They concluded it was a tax.”
On the other side, we have White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew, who refuses to call the individual mandate a tax. He spoke with George Stephanopoulos on ABC news, and said:
“The Supreme Court looked at what the structure of the law was and they saw that one percent of the people would be paying this charge if they chose not to avail themselves of health insurance. For that one percent who have chosen not to buy health insurance, and just pass the burden on to others, there’s this penalty”.
Image by Valerie Everett on Flickr