As a tax, y'all. With Chief Justice Roberts supporting this incursion into individual freedom. From Yahoo! News: "In a victory for President Barack Obama, the Supreme Court upheld his signature health care law's individual insurance mandate in a 5-4 decision, upending speculation after hostile-seeming oral arguments in March that the justices would overturn the law. The mandate has been upheld as a tax, with Chief Justice John Roberts, a Bush appointee, joining the liberal wing of the court to save the law."
The article continues: "The court's four liberal justices agreed that the individual mandate should be upheld as part of Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce, but Roberts disagreed, and wrote that the mandate is actually a tax, despite the Obama administration's reluctance to describe it that way during the bill's passage. In its argument to the court, the government left open the possibility that the mandate is a tax, but did not rely much on that argument. Under the law, people who do not have health insurance will have to pay 1 percent of their income to the IRS starting in 2014. (There are exceptions for some religious beliefs and financial hardship.) 'If an individual does not maintain health insurance, the only consequence is that he must make an additional payment to the IRS when he pays his taxes,' Roberts writes. He adds that this means 'the mandate is not a legal command to buy insurance. Rather, it makes going without insurance just another thing the government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning an income.'"
More about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling: "Justice Anthony Kennedy, usually the court's swing vote, dissented, reading from the bench that he and three conservative justices believe 'the entire Act before us is invalid in its entirety.' In a 65-page dissent, he and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dismissed Roberts' arguments, writing that there is a 'mountain of evidence' that the mandate is not a tax. 'To say that the individual mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it,' they write."
U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare Individual Mandate
