Figures that an exchange on one of those talking head shows would produce a WTF moment when I don’t watch it:

STEPHANOPOULOS:  You were against the individual mandate…

OBAMA:  Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS:  …during the campaign.  Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?

OBAMA:  Well, hold on a second, George. Here — here’s what’s happening.  You and I are both paying $900, on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care.  Now what I’ve said is that if you can’t afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn’t be punished for that.  That’s just piling on. If, on the other hand, we’re giving tax credits, we’ve set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we’ve driven down the costs, we’ve done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you’ve just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances.  And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that’s…

Taxes = government saying “pay us or else…”.  The individual mandate = government saying “buy health insurance, or pay us.  Or else…”.  Whether you call it a tax or not doesn’t really seem to matter, does it?  As for supporting something that he trashed during the election season: DBSIWTC.

Obama citing this as yet another falsehood from the Right is especially instructive, seeing as how the coinage came from a Democratic senator.  The point for the original expression was observing the inevitable problem (beyond the moral one, that is) with forcing people to buy something on pain of monetary penalty and then saying “but we’ll subsidize it!” when the complaints come in: setting the subsidies.

If the amount is too low, then this bit of “reform” makes the issue of affordability even worse.  This happens both immediately in that the cost of insurance you’re required to get will far overshoot the subsidy, and in the long run in that the price would go up over time so the insurance industry can try to eat as much tax money as possible as the subsidy is forced to increase.

On the other hand, say the subsidy is pretty generous.  Well, if you’re going to provide so much for buying health insurance, why even bother with the middle man?  You might as well just purchase the care.  That is, if your goal is actually helping people get health care, which I doubt was ever truly the case.

Now, take the employer mandate.  The idea is that if a business larger than a certain size doesn’t provide its employees with insurance they’ll be penalized in a similar manner.  Similar issue: if the penalty isn’t large enough, then it becomes cheaper to drop coverage than it is to maintain it.  Combine this with the aforementioned individual mandate and you end up with a lot of people for whom the public government-option could be all they can afford anyway.

To the “moderates” out there: see why the liberals are so gung-ho about public government-option?  Note how they’re already angry about this…

To the liberals: see why I say you might as well have just skipped this and went single-payer from the jump?  The health insurance “market” as it stands is a joke, and we have political intervention to thank for that anyway, if you’re not going to roll back the previous distortion then what’s the point in maintaining it?

To Obama & anyone else conveniently spewing the “healthy idiots with money who think they’re invincible are the reason for the mandate” crap: what percentage of the uninsured population do you REALLY think fits that description?  I smelled straw when Reason brought it up as an inane badge of honor of sorts, and I smell it now from you guys using it as a punching bag.