Mitt Romney — or at least his campaign — had it right the first time. Just because the Supreme Court has said the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to buy health insurance is a tax doesn’t mean he should adopt the thesis as a campaign theme.
Before last week’s court ruling, Romney didn’t believe the mandate was a tax. Why pretend he believes it now?
Yet in a move that puts him in accord with other Republicans, Romney on Wednesday repudiated statements made by his staff just two days earlier that maintained he still believed the mandate was a penalty, not a tax.
“The majority of the court said it is a tax, therefore it is a tax. The majority has spoken,” Romney said. “There is no way around that.”
Oh, please. Does Romney accept as gospel everything else the court says? Look, there are many politically important issues to debate regarding the Affordable Care Act, but the question of whether the individual mandate is a tax or a penalty is not one of them. The question is of interest to constitutional scholars, of course, but in practical terms it makes no difference in how the act affects individual Americans.
If you fail to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, you will pay what both Obama believes — and Romney used to believe — is a penalty and what the Supreme Court has concluded is a tax. Either way, the same amount of money will be coming out of your pocket.
We don’t say that as a criticism, by the way, as we have supported the individual mandate as necessary in any system that requires coverage of pre-existing medical conditions. But like Romney, we never considered the mandate a tax and haven’t changed our mind just because Justice John Roberts has a different opinion.
Taxes were certainly mandated under Obamacare — and in fact are among the reasons we worry about its overall effect on the economy and on medical costs.
As The Associated Press pointed out in the wake of the court’s ruling, next year “medical-device makers will pay a 2.3 percent excise tax, which probably will get passed along to patients.” Combine that tax with the act’s other levies and various subsidies, as well as the fact that the law will result in perhaps 30 million uninsured acquiring coverage, and it’s hard to see how the law won’t result in health care gobbling up an even larger share of Gross Domestic Product in the future.
We’d like to see the presidential candidates debate how to rein in the rising cost of health insurance and medical treatment — and their worrisome effect on federal budgets — rather than dwell on the definition of a tax.
As the Congressional Budget Office explained last year, “Spending for health care in the United States has been growing faster than the economy for many years, posing a challenge not only for the federal government’s two major health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, but also for state and local governments and the private sector.”
The president obviously believes the Affordable Care Act will rein in those growing costs. Romney is presumably skeptical, and has his own ideas for what to do. Voters would very much benefit from a serious debate over those conflicting claims.
