C-Kwik wrote:Thanks,
I skimmed through about 30% of it so far and this is hugely more complex than most other court opinions I've read through. This is gonna take a while.
This kind of sums it up thanks to The New York Times
"Mr. Romney Changes His Mind, Again
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/opini ... ml?_r=1&hp
Massachusetts residents who file a state tax return have to provide proof that they have health insurance. If they can afford insurance but don’t have it, they must “pay a penalty through their tax returns,” according to the state Department of Revenue’s Web site.
This is all thanks to former Gov. Mitt Romney, who set up the system — the best of its kind in the country — and is now trying to pretend he doesn’t remember how it works. On Monday, his campaign said Mr. Romney believed the identical requirement in President Obama’s health care law was a penalty, paid through the tax system. Two days later, Mr. Romney rushed to the cameras to contradict the campaign and insist the mandate was a tax.
Why the switch? As he has on so many issues, Mr. Romney caved to Republican conservatives who want him to campaign on the falsehood that the mandate is a vast tax increase on the middle class. The Supreme Court’s decision that the law is constitutional was disastrous to their cause, so they distorted its basic reasoning. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote that the mandate is legal under the Congressional taxing power, which Republicans took a step further, saying the mandate must now be a tax. And not just a tax, but a huge, oppressive tax, one of the largest in history.
It is, of course, no such thing. How many “oppressive taxes” are entirely optional? Anyone who does the smart thing and gets health insurance won’t have to pay it. It is, as Mr. Romney himself described it in 2006, a fee to promote “personal responsibility” and prevent healthy people from freeloading. (Among those who won’t be able to comply with the law are poor people living in states where Republican governors refuse to expand their Medicaid programs using federal dollars — though most of those people don’t make enough to have to pay the penalty.)
The tax-vs.-penalty debate is a legal and semantic issue that has no practical impact on the public, but making this argument says a great deal about Mr. Romney’s inch-deep position on health care. Since the beginning of his campaign, he has fled from his significant achievement in Massachusetts, hoping to attract conservatives who never trusted him.
His explanation has been that it is perfectly acceptable for a state to do something that would be economically ruinous for the federal government to try. He used the same rationale on Wednesday in explaining why the mandate was a pragmatic penalty in Massachusetts but an insidious tax in Washington.
He’d rather talk about this than admit he once had a good idea to cover people without insurance and that Mr. Obama was right to duplicate it. Now he has no plan except a promise to repeal a virtual carbon copy of his own program.
His hairsplitting argument over federalism obscures the real issue for most people: Is the health care system so broken that government must intervene to fix it so that tens of millions can get proper medical care?
Against all evidence, Mr. Romney and his party believe the private system will simply fix itself if government gets out of the way.
At least, that’s what he says he believes now."
Hope this helps ya
Telcoman