Sept 2009 Obama

"“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”

STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.

Well well well.. Yet when defending this law in court the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

Would Obama-Care have passed if it was correctly referred to as a Tax?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/health/policy/18health.html?_r=2&ref=robert_pear
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/18/nyt-obama-wh-will-argue-obamacare-mandate-is-a-tax/

Obama-Care
SOLD as a Mandate and not a tax
Defended in court as a Tax and not a Mandate.