Last week, while testifying before Congress, the president’s acting budget director Jeffrey Zients undercut one of the central legal defenses of the law, admitting that the penalty imposed on those who do not purchase health insurance does not constitute a tax.
This acknowledgement contradicts one of the most important arguments the administration is making before the court. The administration will argue that the mandate is constitutional because it is a tax, and the government has been granted the power to tax.
The president of course went on television during the health care debate and insisted the mechanism punishing people for violating the individual mandate was not a tax. He had to do this to try to defend his campaign promise that he wouldn’t raise taxes on middle-class families, even though he’s done so numerous times already.
We’ve also come to learn just how grossly underestimated the cost of the new law really was.
The Department of Health and Human Services has already received and spent the entirety of its $1 billion budget to implement state-based health care exchanges — and now it’s asking for an additional $860 million to finish the project. No one should be shocked to learn that government needs “just another billion” before implementation has really gotten underway...
Read the rest of "President Obama’s Health Care Law Is Unraveling" by Americans for Prosperity president Tim Phillips here at the Daily Caller.
