Purchase or Else: The Health Insurance ‘Tax’

Abstract

With the Affordable Health Care for America Act, H.R. 3962, 111th Cong. (2009) passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate’s version of a health care bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, H.R. 3590, 111th Cong. (2009) recently passed, this article reviews the particulars of each Act’s respective tax or penalty imposed on individual taxpayers who fail to purchase acceptable health care coverage, and questions whether or not such constitutes a “tax” at all, and if such does, whether or not it is an unconstitutional regulatory tax, indirectly regulating that which Congress cannot under the “Commerce Clause” of the U.S. Constitution; namely, non-participating taxpayers who merely “fail to purchase.”

Keywords: Universal Health Care, tax, health insurance tax, health insurance penalty, unconstitutional, commerce clause, purchase mandate, H.R. 3962, H.R. 3590, health insurance, regulatory tax, Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, Affordable Health Care for America Act