ACA, Debasement of federal Internal Revenue function:

There are uncounted hundreds of billions of dollars lost to the federal government yearly through tax evasion of all kinds, abetted by narratives similar to the conspiratorial views of public health.  Much of this is done by those who believe the federal government, as now operated, to be an illegitimate enterprise at its core, and therefore even if evasion is illegal, it is morally justified.  They see the entire principle of federal taxation as organized extortion that they have every right to resist.  This sentiment is also ascribed to, either genuinely or as reflection of constituencies, by a sizable number of conservative national legislators.  Senator Ted Cruz took this pose when during his filibuster he compared himself to a resister against Nazism.

While the additional tax for any who do not obtain health insurance has been well publicized, and has been reduce below the levels to achieve the balance that is required to avoid the death spiral of adverse selection, there is something worse that is only now being brought to light, as described in this Washington Post article.. 

"Even if the Internal Revenue Service did find that an individual lacked health coverage, they would still need to look at whether he or she qualified for one of the nine exemptions from the individual mandate. These include clauses that allow Americans with religious objections, incarcerated individuals and those who cannot find an affordable plan to not carry health coverage without penalty."

The article then gives a description of how actually paying the penalty can be avoided, but with some effort  The article does not point out that if there are sizable numbers who use these devices to thwart this penalty, the IRS does not have the resources to prove that the individual is actually liable.  And then if they were able to do so for a given case, their array of enforcement options are reduced under a compromise with those who opposed this law and tried to thwart the method of securing universality of insurance by penalizing healthy people who refused to buy policies that subsidized the sick.

The article concludes with, "Typically, the IRS does have a number of steps by which to recoup unpaid taxes. It can garnish your wages, for example, or, in rare cases, seize property. But with the health mandate, the law's drafters specifically barred the agency from any of those more aggressive tactics.  "In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section," Section 1501 of the Affordable Care Act reads, "Such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure."

Our system of internal revenue that is the infrastructure of all federal services from national defense, medical research to a social safety net for the poor, only exists with a reliable source of income from its citizens.  This is a fragile system, but vital, as we see that countries with low compliance rates of income tax, such as Greece, do fall into the abyss of social governmental collapse. This is the first time that this IRS has been stripped of its authority to bring criminal action against those who fraudulently evade taxes, a great victory for those who see this agency as made up of "Jack booted fascists.' as they were described at a house hearing years ago.

Criminal action by the IRS is already restricted to actual provable fraud, which this provision removes, almost inviting the most extreme tax evasion.  This undermining of the legitimacy of our use of police power to extract money from citizens when authorized by law,  is a giant step towards validating those who claim that the very use of such police action is inherently immoral.  This was done without any discussion, or objection, by the party that wanted this bill passed by any means, in the same way that killing Bin Laden was never weighed against the number of children who would contract polio because their parent's worse suspicions of the public health agenda had been confirmed. .