Obamacare is the greatest single expansion of federal regulatory authority in American history. In one stroke, it puts 16 percent of American economic activity — virtually all of health care and health insurance — under the thumb of federal bureaucrats. It dictates the minimum insurance coverage that everyone in the United States must have.
It punishes severely, without a hearing, anyone who deviates below the prescribed minimum. It forces nearly all Americans to acquire coverage in a one-size-fits-all policy, including coverage for events that cannot occur.
Obamacare was passed by both houses of Congress with support from Democrats only, using parliamentary tricks, rather than straight up-or-down votes. All the Democrats voted for it after President Obama promised them and the American people ad nauseam that if they like their current doctor and if they like their current health insurance, they would be able to keep them under Obamacare.
The law was found constitutional by the Supreme Court only after the chief justice — who acknowledged in his opinion in the case that Congress lacks the authority to compel people to engage in interstate commerce by forcing them to purchase a good they don't want — changed his mind on the ultimate outcome of the challenge. In order to save the law from imminent constitutional extinction, he created a novel legal theory, and he persuaded the four progressives on the court to join him.
They ruled that the punishment for the failure to obtain the level of health care coverage that the law requires is actually a tax. Then the court ruled that because Congress can constitutionally tax any event, it can tax nonevents (like the failure to purchase health insurance), and so the entire scheme is constitutional because it is really just a tax law.
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