You don’t have to pay. You just miss out on the credit.
Or
You have to pay or you get fined.
Perhaps numbers would make more sense to you since words are going over your head.
If you pay 0 for health insurance and you choose to get 0 in tax credit.
No money out of your pocket at all
or
You pay 20,000 for a health insurance plan or you pay 8000 in tax.
Out of pocket here is 20,000 or 8,000 dollars. Way more than the 0 dollars in the first case.
Neither 8000 dollars nor 20,000 dollars out of my pocket is as sweet as 0 dollars. But if you’ve got that amount of money is just semantics to you, why not just hand it over to the govt. now?
Go all the way back up to post 10.
“...There is so much social engineering already in the income tax code that either taxes you; or exempts you from taxes; or grants you a “tax credit; that I don’t really know why this particular one makes people more upset than all of the other ones...”
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The point is that once you go down the slippery slope of social engineering in the tax code, (reward you for this; penalize you for that) that this kind of thing should be expected as a “next step” down the slope.
It is just like when “minimum wage” laws went into effect and people not being able to see the possibility of legislating a “maximum wage”.