Americans, incl. large majority of Democrats, think mandate unconstitutional.

[Beet]

The issue is the phrase 'to buy health insurance'. To 'buy' implies something voluntary. An unconditional requirement to buy is not voluntary, so there's some cognitive dissonance, I think, people are unsure of how to conceive it. But the intent is the same as a tax. A tax takes money out of your pocket and puts it into a common pool which is then used to provide you with services out of that pool. This does the same thing. The only difference? In a tax, the government determines where the money goes precisely, whereas here, you have a great deal of freedom to determine where it goes, within the restriction that it be spent on health insurance. The government only mandates that it goes generally for a particular purpose, but not to who exactly.  Hence it is like a tax, but less intrusive.

I would urge the justices to look at the genesis / history of the individual mandate proposal to understand what it is. Originally, various proposals were put forward which would have funded health care through direct taxation. The individual mandate was proposed as a less intrusive substitution that would achieve the same ends. In other words, the genesis of the individual mandate was a tax proposal. The Gallup wording 'buy' or 'purchase' is inherently misleading because it does not fully describe what is going on here.

[Beet]

Obama: Mandate is "not a tax."

Yeah, that is probably the worst interview I have ever seen Obama do. He was defensive, emotional, operating on a political plane and didn't even seem to be listening to what Stephanopoulos was saying. Towards the end I think he realized he wasn't doing well when he said 'my opponents think everything is a tax...', just getting frustrated.

[Beet]

the Dems' worse nightmare is to have Obamacare upheld by the SCOTUS.

The country's worst nightmare would be a partial overturning.  Must carry combined with the elimination of the personal mandate would destroy the individual insurance market, and yet would be so popular initially that it could not get repealed until said market was destroyed, with all the consequences thereof.

We're not going to get real change unless there is a crisis. Arguably the worse things get, the more it create political consensus that something must be done and will push Congress to enact something that controls costs. The reason they haven't already is because it is too unpopular. There is too much inertia. The real worst nightmare is a return to the 2008 status quo of ever rising costs and increasing numbers of uninsured, with politicians cowed from reforming health care by 1994 and 2010. What's needed is a total overhaul of the entire system from the ground up, and destruction of the individual market would help bring that about.